This article originally appeared in the July 1987 issue of SPIN. In memory of Jerry Garcia, who died on Aug. 9, 1995, we’re republishing this interview

When a supernova explodes, by the time you see it, its light is — well, at least as old as Jerry Garcia. Does that make contemplating its brilliance “nostalgia?”

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That seems to be the only way the uninitiated conceive of the Grateful Dead. Even people who’ve witnessed their feel-good-and-pass-it-on spiritual celebrations can miss the point. It’s easy to focus on the Dead scene’s assorted “cosmic” effluvia — the tie-dyes, the hallucinogens, the bongs and braids and blissed-out flower children — but it’s the vibration from the vortex, the inspired, endlessly creative good-time music of the world’s greatest experimental-electric-folk-blues-garage band, that makes the phenomenon happen. It’s not for everyone, but it endures. And as it does, mutating through exposure to the vast, increasingly strange popular culture of 1980s America, it becomes too diverse to categorize.

The Dead keep evolving into something new, while their unwritten credo of benign anarchy remains unchanged. So does Jerry Garcia, their lead guitarist, vocalist, and reluctant guru for the past 22 years. His frame may have thickened and his hair turned gray, but his battered corduroys and oversized T-shirts look the same. The fingers are as nimble as ever, and now that he’s fully recovered from a brush with death, after suddenly falling into a diabetic coma last July, so is his mind.

RIPPLE
Garcia: Music is a language of its own. It’s as close as earth comes to having a universal language, although even music, like language, is idiom. Music lets everybody talk at once and everybody listens at once.

FRIEND OF THE DEVIL
Garcia: We’ve always harbored a basic distrust of big charity just like we have a basic distrust of big business or big anything, but I hate to be categorical about stuff like that because I don’t have any panaceas. I don’t have those kinds of ideas. My ideas tend to be rats in cages rather than tigers loose on the streets.

ATTICS OF MY LIFE
Garcia: Our success has been very slow, luckily, so it hasn’t been a great shock the way it might have been. We’ve enjoyed a long slow curve. We still don’t know if we have one audience that would fill one stadium, or whether we have audiences to fill several stadiums, because our audience is devoted enough to come to wherever we’ll play. It’s kind of elusive. It may look bigger than it actually is. Probably the best way to figure it out is to release a record. That’s about the only kind of gauge we have, and even then I’m not really sure. Maybe a handful of Deadheads will buy the albums and circulate them freely to their friends. But I’m not worried about it. It’s tremendously gratifying to have an audience that’s large enough to support us the way they do. It means we have more chances to be better. I welcome that. If there are people who find enough cultural furniture in the Grateful Dead outback, that’s great with me. It’s where I live.

CAT UNDER THE STARS
Garcia: The record I worked hardest at and liked best was Cats Under the Stars [a solo LP]. That was kind of like my baby. It did worse than any other record I ever did. I think I probably gave away more copies than I sold. It was amazingly, pathetically bad. But I’ve learned not to invest a lot of importance in ’em, although it’s nice to care about your work. As far as I personally am concerned, I don’t feel I’ve played that well on Grateful Dead records. I feel I’ve played better in shows, generally, and on other people’s records.

LIVE DEAD
Garcia: If I didn’t make another record, I wouldn’t lose a lot of sleep over it. Making a record is going into a mode that’s different from what the Grateful Dead does. What the Grateful Dead does is perform live. When we make a record it’s, “OK, now we’re going to make a record.” Which means, “Now we’re gonna get weird.” There are all kinds of ways of dealing with that. Sometimes it’s fun to do something in the studio that’s completely outrageous or requires a completely different kind of thinking. It depends on what kind of ideas you’re having. When I write a song, sometimes I get ideas for a setting and sometimes I don’t. But the thing about being in a band is that if I don’t have ideas for a setting, everybody else helps provide that. There’s the thing of composing music, and there’s arranging and performing music. When you’re playing in a band, and the band functions, the band produces the arrangements. That’s what the Grateful Dead is good at doing. Sometimes they evolve over a long period of time. Sometimes they snap right into exigence. It depends on the tune. It depends on a lot of other things.

BROKEDOWN PALACE
Garcia: I’m not particularly prolific when I write. I’m lucky if I squeeze out two tunes a year, maybe three. Sometimes I hit a streak and do a few more. But usually it’s slow going, and if something real special happens, it’s a matter of tremendous luck. If you’re somebody who produces a lot of music and you have access to a recording studio, then a recording studio is an instrument in the same sense that the Grateful Dead is an instrument. The difference is that you perform for a record and maybe never perform the song again in your life. The record is the definitive statement about the song — that’s it, that’s as long as it lives, that’s as long as it lasts, and that’s it. I’ve been in that mode at various times; I’m not in it much lately and I haven’t been thinking that way much.

GOOD LOVIN’
Garcia: Since the ’70s, I’ve put a certain amount of energy into trying to improve as a musician. That’s all taken up with me and my relationship to my instrument, which is different from my relationship to the Grateful Dead. In the Grateful Dead, there are nights when I have a good night, but the rest of us don’t. I like the nights when we all have a good night. Then, I’m not so concerned about my own performance. It’s more of a flow — it’s just happening. Over the years, it’s more like when we have an on night, it’s an on night for everybody. When we have an off night, it’s an off night for everybody. Now our off nights are at least competent. They may be flat, but they’re not awful. It used to be if we had a bad night it was awful. I mean fuckin’ awful. So our percentages have improved.

MORNING DEW
Garcia: I get surprised by live performance. Somebody will say “Hey, listen to this tape of you guys…,” and I hear things and I can’t believe it’s us. Sometimes it sounds so nifty. Really, the only thing that counts is the last performance. That’s the sum total of everything. The emotional reality of that is way in advance of anything. It doesn’t do me any good to know that we were great once.

CASEY JONES
Garcia: I feel bad about that guru kind of stuff. I’ve made a real effort, so far anyway, to tell people that I’m not leading anybody anywhere. I’m extremely paranoid. If you look at what we’re doing, it has all the elements of the most extreme fascism. So that scares me a lot. I worry about it. That’s not what we’re about. It’s not what that power is about. It’s not about directing it somewhere. And it’s certainly not up to me to decide what it’s for or what it even is or even if it exists. But if people find something to believe in, in the midst of all that stuff, it’s OK with me. It’s just that I think there are better places to look than in other human beings. Would you like to have the responsibility of leading thousands of people off into some oblivion somewhere? If you thought that you were capable of it, you would automatically be the wrong person. So I’m disqualifying myself early. Whatever it is that the Grateful Dead does, it’s not me doing it.

RAMBLE ON ROSE
Garcia: The Grateful Dead is always in the process of becoming something. In that sense, we’re not that different from 10 years ago. It’s never that we arrive at this moment and we look around and say, “Oh, hey, too much, we’re the Grateful Dead now.” It’s always being on the verge of breaking over into some new space. What happens is new material gradually gets absorbed by the band, and old material, we forget we knew it, it sort of disappears. And then, we go back and dig up other old material that we’ve forgotten and it’s new again. We’re kind of endlessly recycling stuff, and each time something comes back a little different. Or real different, depending on the tune or on what’s going on in the rest of culture. We are of this time, of this society, so everything that happens touches us.

FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN
Garcia: Drugs are one of those things everybody has to decide for himself. I’ve learned lots from drugs, and I think life would be terribly dull without them. I think the whole drug thing … they’ve just got it all wrong. It’s so wrong that I feel funny addressing it. I don’t want anybody to have the idea I’m somehow endorsing drugs. But I think anything that gives you the ability to change your personality or see things from another perspective is helpful. But it’s people’s responsibility to deal with it in their own ways. There are definitely traps there too. I just feel that the whole way drugs are dealt with is totally wrong. They should be like food. Is anybody considered a food addict because they eat three times a day? So if you’re going to put something in your body, why can’t you think of that as your food? If a person is an addict, strung out on some drug, I mean, it’s up to them whether they take it or not. Who are we trying to protect is the question. We’re all being controlled somehow. So why not be able to take a little more of that control onto yourself? If it were like that, people wouldn’t die of overdoses. That’s the kind of stuff I don’t like. It’s a drag to lose a friend because of an overdose. But other than that, in terms of morality, I have no problem with drugs. To me, drugs are like food.

SUGAR MAGNOLIA
Garcia: I like mushrooms. They’re more reliable and less jangly. They’re sort of good-natured. I’ve never heard of anybody having a bad trip on mushrooms. They’re sort of jolly vegetables. I generally don’t like the ones that are off of the Methedrine chain. They’re too jangly for me. I like a drug to be invisible, physically. I hate physical discomfort.

DARK STAR
Garcia: They say my illness was pretty serious, but I missed it. I really wasn’t there for the worst of it. For me, it wasn’t a near-death situation. I didn’t have any of those kinds of experiences. The kind of experiences I had were certainly psychedelic. I just felt as though I were involved in some kind of incredible struggle, but it never occurred to me to stop struggling. So I struggled until I finally just sort of surfaced. Then the struggle took a different tack, but my “me,” my soul or whatever, was just struggling. I wasn’t really in control, like having a dream.

This illness changed me, but then so did LSD. So did going to Egypt. I’ve had about a dozen totally life-altering experiences. They’re kind of before-and-afters. There was the me before I went to Egypt (with the Dead in 1978), and there’s the me since I’ve been to Egypt. The automobile accident when I was young, that’s one of the things that got me committed to being a musician. It kind of gave me a boot. Before that I was kind of running around on the streets and fucking off. I wasn’t absolutely motivated by something. It was sort of an indirect thing, like this illness. When I was in the hospital, the only thing I could think about was, “Man, if I get out of here, I’m gonna play every chance I get.” The worst thing about being in the hospital was not being able to play.

AMERICAN BEAUTY
Garcia: Material things matter almost not at all. No matter what I have around me, I treat it badly. Everything I’ve got has cigarette burns in it. I’ve never really been able to get attached to stuff. I have a few nice things. I’ve had nice things in the past and lost them mostly, or given them away or drifted apart from them. I have a hard time having material lust. There aren’t that many things crying out to me on the material plane saying, “Have me, own me.” I’m just not that sort of person. I never was. Experience is my material. If I’m attached to this plane, it’s because of experience. That’s the thing that keeps me here.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

This article originally appeared in the September 1987 issue of SPIN. In honor of the 50th anniversary of hip hop, we’re republishing it here.

The room is filled with young, black rappers. I sniff around for the old familiar rock ‘n’ roll smells—beer, sweat, and weed—but all I get are competing whiffs of orange juice and aftershave. Since it is four hours before the main event, L.L. Cool J is nowhere to be found. His tour manager, Tony Rome, talks animatedly into the phone, stopping whenever some new guy enters the room to introduce me as Laura Devlin. Finally, he apologizes. “You’ll have to excuse me. I’ve been on the road too long.”

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I nod in understanding. He thinks that the room is moving. He tells the rappers what he can remember about me, that I’m “no stranger to rock ‘n’ roll.” This holds their interest for about a minute, and after being asked a polite five questions about my-husband-the-Ramone, I’m retired to the wall. The talk returns to rap music and each other. Who’s good, who’s better. Who gave up rapping to become a singing-star. “I just told the guy to forget it,” says Ecstacy of Whodini, laughing. “I mean, it’s one thing if he wants to get three motherfucker backup singers. But for him to just go out there alone and sing—he just wants to be socially accepted, to sing because Diana sings and maybe he can get invited to the American Music Awards. No way it’s gonna happen.”

Here in New Orleans, on a five-band rapstravaganza starring L.L. Cool J, the big topic is, inappropriately enough, the Beastie Boys. Currently on the road with the star of their own show, a much-hyped giant hydraulic penis, the Beasties so infuriated the decent folk of Columbus, Georgia, that the elders called a town meeting and passed a law forbidding obscenities at local rock concerts.

So a week later, along came L.L. Cool J, the rap sex symbol of the moment, and business as usual: rubbing his balls, humping the audience. Shirtless, he simulated sex on a couch with his bronze back to the crowd. All you could see was a Kangol hat and this terrific ass, undulated up and down with the lyrics of his pop hit, “I Need Love.” As soon as the show finished, the Columbus authorities threw him in jail.

“But it wasn’t a racial thing,” Tony Rome assures me later. When I laugh cynically, he repeats himself. “It wasn’t a racial thing. it was a rock censorship thing.”

I’m sure it was. It’s just funny that the Beasties’ stampede on behalf of Evil Incarnate has finally won them recognition in law. And it’s ironic that L.L. Cool J—that’s short for Ladies Love Cool J—went to the slammer for some other rappers’ giant hydraulic schlong.

SPIN: Was the boxing photo on the back of Bigger and Deffer put there to draw a connection between yourself and Muhammad Ali?
L.L. Cool J: No, but I like the connection. I put the picture there to signify my own hunger, strength, and power. Ali is definitely a good example because I’ve got the eye of the tiger and I’m not gonna chill. My first album was a title match and I won the belt. Every one after that is a title match until I retire and bow out gracefully. Nobody’s gonna talk me.
SPIN: Why not?
L.L. Cool J: I’m not on a souped-up little brat trip. I’m not gonna let anyone take me because I’m gonna keep fighting and working. That’s not an arrogant point of view. I’m hungry and self-confident, and when you work hard, why not be proud? Pride and arrogance are two different things, and my audience—they know what time it is.
SPIN: When did you realize you had talent?
L.L. Cool J: I’ve been rhymin’ since I was nine years old.
SPIN: People see political significance in your work.
L.L. Cool J: Really? Where? My audience comes to my shows to have a good time.
SPIN: The ladies love you.
L.L.Cool J: That was just something I said a long time ago, once. A girl said to me, “You swear that the ladies love Cool J?” And I said, “I swear.” Then I made it L.L. because Ladies Love was just too egotistical. If they love me, they do, but I’m not going after that.

“Did you hear about the record, man?” L.L. asks Tony Rome triumphantly, slapping him on the back. The other performers are standing around talking about how great the record is, how great L.L. is, how great they all are. “Billboard says the record is No. 1.”

Tony corrects him: It’s No. 1 on the Black charts, No. 6 Pop. “But that’s good, L.L. It means it’s gonna be No. 1. It’s got a bullet.”

Bullet or not, L.L. is visibly disappointed. “You’re a great man,” says one of the members of Whodini, the group that played above L.L. last year. This year they open for him.

“I want it to be No. 1,” L.L. finishes.

It’s easy to see why the young girls love him. He’s handsome, tall, and poised for competition; athletically built and composed. His walk is half march, half strut, with his head forward and down, like he’s looking for something intimidating on the floor. Young girls love him in part because he’s distant, inaccessible. Even the ladies who are lucky enough to be granted backstage passes stand a proper ten feet away, whispering and giggling among themselves. Unless absolutely forced to do otherwise, he only talks to his fellow B-boys, passing all female attentions along to his teammates.

SPIN: You’re real disappointed that the record’s not a bigger hit?
L.L. Cool J: Yeah, but I thought about it, and even though I want to make continual strides to satisfy that audience, they love me because I did “I Need Love,” and I might not ever make another record like that. If I don’t, then I don’t care. I want to satisfy my own audience. Those others—well, I can’t have my heart set on them because they aren’t loyal. Next time they might not be cool. I’ll keep my cool audience.
SPIN: Who’s your cool audience?
L.L. Cool J: I’m not really sure what my demographics are. I’ve got to sit down with my manager and figure that out.

Ten thousand people, mostly black, mostly between the ages of seven and twenty-five, assemble at the University of New Orleans Lakefront Arena. Performing first is Def Jam’s newest rap attraction, Public Enemy, who march onstage in army active sportswear. The guy in the middle, the one who isn’t dressed like he just finished filming Platoon, speaks to the crowd. “There are people out there who don’t want this show to go on. I’m talking about the fuckin’ Klan, man.”

This message falls on deaf ears. The logistics and the timing are off. “Why don’t you just shut up,” the guy next to me calls out. “We came here to party.”

After a short set, Public Enemy yield to Kool Moe Dee, who does a funny song about a meaningful one-night stand with a woman hot like a microwave: “Three days later, go see the doctor.” The crowd loves him, and goes even higher with the following act, Doug E. Fresh. “L.L.’s gonna have a tough time beating that,” the guy next to me says, to no one in particular.

Finally, an elaborately lit, massive boom box is lowered from the ceiling. It has a working cassette door, which opens, and, to the delight of more than 5,000 screaming women, ejects L.L. Cool J. When the radio rises back up, L.L. stands in an exact replica of his old schoolyard, P.S. 119 in Queens, New York, which he chose so he could “feel like I was back at school, rappin’.”

We bask in radio afterglow. L.L. raps the songs from Bigger and Deffer, his critical and commercial smash; he throws out candy during “Kanday,” and asks the girls what they cooked for dinner tonight. “Do you cook Cajun?” he purrs. “I love the food here. Do you cook creole and crawfish tonight?” The purring and the cooking talk has the boys uncomfortable; they shift their bodies and focus on the floor. Preparing for the performance of “I Need Love,” the stage crew sets up a leather loveseat flanked on either side by palm plans. L.L. raps the ballad subtly at first, then begins to caress his balls. He stretches himself across the sofa, his back to the audience, and simulates sexual intercourse. It’s the most erotic thing anybody’s ever done to a sofa in public. The sexual bravado, with its mild element of teenage perversity, sets the boys at ease again, and now they love L.L. also.

He exhorts the crowd to scream his name: they gladly obey. He tells them to make the “L” symbols with their fingers, to light matches in the dark, to spell the names of his crew members; they couldn’t be happier. “These are not fans,” he says later. “I think of a fan as something you use to cool down. These people heat me up more. I call them my supporters.”

SPIN: Why do rappers rub their balls?
L.L. Cool J: A lot of guys who aren’t rappers rub their balls. With me it’s a habit. I just grab it to be grabbing it. I grab my dick because it’s there.
SPIN: How important are new sneakers?
L.L. Cool J: I buy new sneakers all the time, every week, every day. You gotta be fresh. I own at least two-hundred pairs. I travel with about fifty pairs. When I’m not busy, I go out and buy more.
SPIN: Maybe you should get a sneaker endorsement.
L.L. Cool J: Maybe in the future, I’d like it.
SPIN: White rock stars make lots of money, and when they flaunt their possessions, the fans get mad. You say stuff like, “Now I’ve got Porsche money,” and everyone thinks its cool.
L.L. Cool J: Look, I hate speaking about this racism stuff and I don’t even have all the answers. But the way I see it, the majority, not all, but a lot of white people are middle-and upper-middle class. They have money and because so many in their class dress up, it’s cooler to dress down. A lot of black people are seen to be lower-middle class and even poor, and it’s just cooler for them to dress up. It makes things even. You go to a high school where it’s half black and half white, and the white kids wear jeans with holes in them, while the black kids dress up. Everything evens out.
SPIN: When you performed “I Need Love,” the guys in the audience were put off at first. Then you attacked the sofa and they relaxed.
L.L. Cool J: I’m showing them that I wasn’t soft about it, that I’m cool. And they know exactly what I’m talking about.
SPIN: Who’d you write the song for?
L.L. Cool J: No one. I just felt romantic on that particular day. That’s all.
SPIN: Just that day?
L.L. Cool J: Just that day.

The big problem after the show is getting all these guys back to the hotel. “The chief of police visited the show tonight,” says Tony. “I don’t want to get these boys hangin’ around the French Quarter, getting arrested.”

Arrested for what?

“Hangin’ around. Run-D.M.C. comes here next week, and if there’s any trouble, it reflects badly on them. The chief was just here asking about the security for their concert.”

Amid hearty cheers and self-congratulations, the crews board the busses. Someone declares that the security problems are because “the Beastie Boys are assholes,” but L.L.’s preoccupations are elsewhere. “I want those women that are hanging around on the busses to get lost. I’m real tired of this shit.”

“Now is not the time to talk about it,” Tony says, but L.L. repeats his annoyance. Tony keeps trying to shut him up, to make him aware of the invisible writer girl on the bus, but L.L. couldn’t care less. Then he turns to Ecstacy and laughs. “Every time you see a skeezer that you like, she turns out to be a front.”

SPIN: What’s a skeezer and what’s a front?
L.L. Cool J: Oh, you heard that? [laughs]. That’s when the fellas are talking about a pretty girl walking around the hotel and she doesn’t want to give the guy nothing. She’s a front. She ain’t giving up nothing, she’s just frontin’. That’s why I don’t mess with no groupies in the hotel, because they’re all fronts. I don’t even want to find out anyway, because Liberace died, and so did Rock Hudson. So I just look at them like they’re all fronts, and that’s what keeps me from messing with them. I don’t mess around on the road. I get my girls in New York.
SPIN: Are women equal to you?
L.L. Cool J: Just like anybody else, a women get treated how she lets herself get treated.
SPIN: In your raps, you say some pretty tough things about girls. You’ve got this line about your rival’s woman and your name tattooed on her ass.
L.L. Cool J: You know that cliché, behind every great man, there’s a great woman and all that bullshit. I’ve got a lot of respect, but I also speak the truth. If I took his girl and she’s sitting on my lap, I speak about it.
SPIN: What do women like about you?
L.L. Cool J: I don’t know.
SPIN: What do you like in a girl?
L.L. Cool J: I like pretty, quiet girls.
SPIN: I guess you talk so much that there’s no room for her to be noisy.
L.L. Cool J: I guess so.
SPIN: Did you ever hit a girl?
L.L. Cool J: I don’t believe in hitting on women. It’s disrespectful.
SPIN: If you treat women the way they deserve, does that mean treat bad girls badly?
L.L. Cool J: No. I ignore them.
SPIN: What’s the nicest compliment you’ve gotten?
L.L. Cool J: I can tell you the funniest one. The girl comes up to me and says, “L.L., I love all your records except three.”
SPIN: What’s the worst thing?
L.L. Cool J: The loss of privacy and the envy.
SPIN: Is there a lot of competition between yourself and Run and the Beasties?
L.L. Cool J: I’m not having any competition with them.
SPIN: Are they having one with you?
L.L. Cool J: I don’t know. They’re groups. I’m trying to get my own thing. I don’t care about nothing they have. I’m tryin’ to make it to the top without steppin’ on toes. I don’t give two shits about what they’re doing. I wish them well but I don’t really give a damn. You don’t ever wish anybody bad because when you try to dig one grave, you end up diggin’ two.

We wait to board a 19-seater plane to Birmingham, Alabama. The pretty girl behind the ticket desk recognizes the group and asks for autographs. The guys line up chivalrously, happy to comply. All except L.L. He sits down, reads a magazine. Only when the girl asks him personally does he grant her his signature.

Before we board, Tony takes L.L. aside. After the conference, L.L. sits down next to me. “Ask all your questions, now.” he says.

SPIN: How did you lose your virginity?
L.L. Cool J: I had sex.
SPIN: Can you tell me any good sexual fantasies you’ve had?
L.L. Cool J: Sexual fantasies? Nah, I got none. A sexual fantasy [laughs] Are you serious? A sexual fantasy? That’s real ill.
SPIN: Look, when you’re a sex symbol, you’ve got to answer questions like this. Do you get along with your old girlfriends?
L.L. Cool J: Old girlfriends? You mean the ones over thirty years old? It’s not like I’m that old where I have old girlfriends. I ain’t been out there twenty years. I’m nineteen. What’s an old girlfriend?
SPIN: But you express a lot of experience in your songs.
L.L. Cool J: Listen, there’s no Yvette, there’s no Kanday, and I wrote “I Need Your Love” for that minute. I believe all entertainers are schizophrenic. In that moment your personality changes. You write things, and then you come back. All these songs—it’s just a picture.
SPIN: Are you afraid of everything?
L.L. Cool J: I’m afraid that this plane is gonna crash.

Rap history’s a relatively short one, but when L.L. Cool J declares he’s the “greatest rapper in the history of rap,” he’s uncharacteristically understanding of the matter. Other rappers might have attracted a more exclusive audience, maybe even—hard to imagine at this moment—a bigger audience, but no one has yet to inspire what he does with his audience. Adoration. No questions asked.

Perhaps the press’s rush to see significance in his appeal is due to the political style of his approach: pure politician on the campaign trail. In person, he gets down with his “supporters,” not as the mouth that roared, or even as a sexual hotbed of bad ideas, but as an ordinary kid who understands the appeal of his ordinariness. Apart from his small circle of B-boy friends, L.L. divides his fans/supporters into two camps. At his first promo appearance in Birmingham, he pointedly ignores the groupies, preferring to kiss the babies and pose and chat with children.

“We should let anyone under 14 come to the shows for free,” he whispers to his manager. “Tell the children to go to the bus before we go on, and we’ll give them the tickets.”

Tony doesn’t reply. He looks distracted, like he’s trying to figure out how much money it might lose them.

He should run for mayor, I suggest.

“You should print that!” Tony says gleefully. “Print it. L.L. Cool J for president!”

Meanwhile, at least five radio stations are awaiting his visit. We listen to the announcements as a limo takes us to the first one. L.L. keeps peeking out the window, satisfied when passing car passengers recognize him. “Oh my God, it’s him!” one girl yells. He immediately looks away.

The radio is playing “I’m Bad.” Several second into the rap a distant “motherfucker” comes across, the guys burst out laughing. “I guess he just forgot to listen to it before he played it,” L.L. concludes.

We stop for take-out food. Ecstacy wants a couple pieces of chicken. “Fuck it,” L.L. says. “Get a bucket.” We settle for Burger King, and L.L. gets two orders of everything. As he balances the food on his lap, a women sticks her head in the window, hands him an umbrella, and asks him to autograph it. Outside dozens more fans are gathering. L.L. checks them out only long enough to see if they’re looking at him. It’s like he’s looking to see how well his record is selling.

“I hate this shit. I’m eating now,” he says to the woman, while trying not to spill food on the umbrella. “Couldn’t we do this later?” She looks like she’s about to cry. “Okay give it to me. But you know it would have been better if we’d done it later.” He signs the thing and the girl goes away jubilantly with her score.

“You know, Tony, this is the part I hate about it. The part when you understand how little privacy you’ve got. They don’t care about me at all. They’d ask me to sign an autograph if I was pissing on the toilet. They’d just slip the paper on under the door and say, ‘Sign.’

“And a guy like me, I might just open the door, turn around, and ask, ‘What’s that you want?’ and piss down their leg.”

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

This article originally appeared in the February 1988 issue of SPIN. In memory of Tony Bennett, who died on July 21 at the age of 96, we’re republishing it here.

Tony Bennett is cool.

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I have felt this way since the early sixties. Sinatra was hip, but Tony was cool. He was a swinging singer. He was a rocking role model. He was a hip cat. His bow tie looked good undone.

When I was about 15 I went to a concert downtown by myself. At the time I thought I was the only white person there; I was definitely in a minority situation. When Nina Simone came out in Afro regalia and started talking black power, I got scared, but I remained cool. I was there to see Dizzy, Cannonball, Jimmy Smith, Dinah Washington, and Nina Simone too. I decided I was just going to stay put. I figured, fuck it, I’m 15. I didn’t fuck up the blacks. Hey, I’m on their side. I’m a hip cat. I’m staying. And it was cool.

My friends and I were cool and we knew that Ray Charles was seven to the eleventh power cooler than Peter, Paul, and Mary. If anybody asked me who my favorite rock group was, I guess I’d have said the Coasters or Major Lance. I knew I was living in a classical period. And I knew that Tony Bennett was as cool a singer as Mel Torme, if not more so, and good-looking too. Tony Bennett was cooler than Peter Lawford, Jack Kennedy, Joey Bishop. He was like up there with like Caroline Jones, Ernie Kovacs, or Steve Allen.

To me Tony Bennett was always a great jazz singer and a serendipitous cat. The fact that he sang a song about San Francisco is, I think, entirely extra, gravy, lagniappe, the frosting on the cake.

He was a role model of white cool. He was one of our few heroes who never acted like a jerk. Now I know it’s because Tony Bennett always wanted to be an artist first, and to lead “The Good Life” second, and the money and the hype were like secondarysville, man. He knew where it was at because he was with it. The cat dug to blow.

Some years later I started listening to Tony Bennett again. Columbia Records issued a package of some rare vocal sides, Singin’ Till the Girls Come Home, including unreleased jazz sides with Stan Getz, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Elvin Jones. Wow. It swings in perpetuity.

Then in ’87 a big double LP appeared: Tony Bennett, Jazz. Alright. More of the same: remarkable sides of the singer as a musician among musicians. And what musicians: the aforementioned plus Count Basie, Art Blakey, Nat Adderley, Milt Hinton, Joe Newman, Zoot Sims. Like wow. Play it again. And then came the new one, Bennett/ Berlin, Tony doing all Irving Berlin, the way Irving Berlin is supposed to be done: right. With flawless orchestration and great playing and a little help from cats like Dexter Gordon.

I went to see his show.

It was a great show. The whole family had a great time. First Tony gets down with his trio. Then a huge string orchestra levitates from the cellars of Radio City and it’s Tony with jazz trio and serious strings doing the great songs. Then the Diz comes out and blows and sweats and the joint is jumping. Yo, that’s show business.

I took the release of Berlin and this concert as an opportunity to interview my old role model and see how he stacked up.

I found him totally solid and down by legal precedent. He was living in the moment, checking it all out. He looks incredibly young for somebody who hit it big in the fifties. When I saw him on-stage, I wondered if he dyed his do, but up close I saw the few white hairs and realized that it was either natural or a very expensive job.

Tony Bennett: Having this Berlin album out is really exciting. I’ve been getting rave reviews on it and that’s fantastic. I’ve never seen anything like it. There’s jazz and there’s pop. But this is being accepted everywhere, even by people who are not really into jazz or pop.

SPIN: But your career has sort of spanned a lot of categories. You’ve been successful as a jazz singer and a pop singer.

Sinatra taught me that years ago. He was very helpful to me when I first started. He gave me some good suggestions and one of the things he always mentioned was: “Stay unpredictable. Don’t be predictable. You might go good for four or five records, but then the ax falls on you if you’re just doing the same old thing.” So you have to do a lot of footwork. You have to be flexible and show up unexpectedly and surprise everybody. It’s an interesting game. The whole game with me is longevity. I’ve been doing this 35 years and I’ve been through every phase of the recording industry. I’ve gone from 78s to 45s to hi-fi to stereo to quadrophonic to digital.

I was amazed when you said during your show that you had released 89 albums.

I did three albums a year for 23 years straight. It was good, though. It was a great musical adventure. To be able to sing with Bill Evans on the piano, to sing with the Philharmonic, to sing at Carnegie Hall, to sing with Count Basie and all these wonderful musicians — Zoot Sims, Buddy Rich, Woody Herman, and all of them. To rub shoulders with them and get to know them was a thrill. I met Art Tatum and Billie Holiday. I used to follow her into the recording studio. In those days we used to have to cut four songs in three-and-a-half hours. And those are her great standards today.

I just found out that when Mitch Miller found you, you were working with Bob Hope. How did that happen?

Pearl Bailey. She put me on her show to open up. I was the only white guy in a whole black show. I cracked Bob Hope up. “Look at this guy!” he said. “Let’s go uptown to the Paramount Theatre, I want to introduce you.”

And how did she find you?

I was singing in the club. It was the Greenwich Village Inn. She was coming in next week and she heard me sing and she said to the boss, “If you want me here next week you keep this boy on.”

Before that you were a singing waiter?

I was a singing waiter when I was 16. In Astoria, Long Island. That was fun. Two Irish waiters and myself. When I had to learn something like “My Gal Sal” or whatever that was requested that I didn’t know, we’d go in the kitchen and they’d teach it to me. I’d sing it and get an extra tip. Irving Berlin started out as a singing waiter.

Were you without a deal for a long time?

Yeah, but it wasn’t actually that I got booted out. It was my decision. I just painted. That’s what I really wanted to do. I’d never had enough time to paint.

The last album I made before my new deal was with Bill Evans. It was on my own label, Improv. I had a wonderful label. It had critical acclaim. It just didn’t have the distributorship. I made about five of my own records on that label, but I had many other artists on it. We had Charlie Byrd, we had Fatha Hines, Marian McPartland, Torri Zito . . . very good musicians and very good records.

There are smaller jazz labels that are doing well now. Like Flying Dutchman. Maybe you were just ahead of your time.

That’s what Mitch Miller used to tell me all the time. But he’d say it like it was a put-down. I’d say, “What’s wrong with that?” I’d say, “Let me be a spearhead. Let me be a scout.” The credits that I built up I’m proud of. I’m thrilled that my life turned out to be such a musical adventure. I went to Rio de Janeiro and one day a bass player named Don Payne said, “Come out to the beach. I want you to meet somebody.” I said, “Ahh . . .” He said, “Come on down. This is different.” I went down and I met Joao Gilberto, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and Astrud Gilberto. They were on the beach just playing bossa nova. It was the first time I’d ever heard it. I brought it back to San Francisco from Rio and had the disc jockeys play it on the radio. I never saw anything catch on so fast in my life. But I actually brought the first Joao Gilberto records to America. In Rio they know it. But they don’t know it here. In Rio, if I’m coming down, they’ll preadvertise it as “The man who brought bossa nova to America.” They treat me like a king.

I also did a country record with a big string orchestra on it with Mitch Miller and Rosemary Clooney. Before that, country just had a certain instrumentation and it never broke out of that 300,000 record sales that Hank Williams used to do. We had the first crossover hits from country music. Rosemary and I sold two million records each. I did “Cold, Cold Heart.”

Did you think “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” would be a hit?

No. We did it out of necessity. We were going to San Francisco, to the Fairmont Hotel, for the first time. We were in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and there was Ralph, myself, and a bartender on an afternoon. We were writing the song down and the bartender said, “You record that song and I’ll buy it.” We thanked him, but we didn’t pay any attention. But then we recorded it and it just broke internationally. It just keeps selling. It’s still selling.

Do you ever get tired of people associating you with that song?

Not at all. You see, Maurice Chevalier, who is one of the great international performers, has been a role model for me. I travel all over the world now. And he was able to conquer every country. And he sang about Paris. And in the United States our Paris is San Francisco. It’s full of elegance, quality; it’s attained a very high degree of civilization. It’s handmade. It’s built beautifully. It’s funny, but in the 25 years I’ve been singing that song I’ve never met anybody who said that they were disappointed by a trip to San Francisco.

In your concert when you said that you and Sinatra were the last of the saloon singers, I thought, “Hey, what about Mel Torme?”

That’s what Sinatra says. He says that he and I are the only two. So you’ll have to ask him about that. If you have the courage.

Your voice still sounds great. Do you do anything to keep in shape?

I do 20 minutes of bel canto scales just to keep my voice in shape. I’m always thinking about music. Music and painting. I’m doing both all the time.

How long have you been painting?

My whole life.

Did you study?

I’ve studied a lot. I’m studying right now. I’m studying portrait painting right now. I’ve had nothing but good teachers. There’s a fellow named Rudolph de Harak who had a lot to do with building the Egyptian wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he’s like a brother to me. My mother had him come in with us when his mother died. He’s now the number-one graphic artist in America, and he’s always pointed me toward painting and put me into art schools. Then I had private tutors the rest of my life. But I like to go to schools, like the Academy of Art down in the Village. That’s a fantastic place. You have to learn form before you can be free, and they teach the old Michelangelo techniques of studying the bones and then the muscles and then the skin and then the shadings. You learn from the bottom up. And I like that kind of traditional teaching. There are no shortcuts and if you do it the right way it really gets good. I love the whole process.

Who are your favorite painters?

Well, among the masters I like Michelangelo. And then among modern painters I like David Hockney. I love David Hockney’s work. I consider him the greatest leader of the era. He has a way of improving the way we see things, a lot of new concepts that are legit. But there are so many. You fall in love with Matisse, with Cézanne, with Raphael. And the Chinese could see clearer than anybody.

So what do you think of Sinatra as a painter?

Well, he paints modern. I think he’s very good. The couple of things that I’ve seen of his are very nice. He knows what’s happening. His favorite painter is Frank Stella.

On your album Jazz, you play with some of the great musicians of our time. There are a lot of different sessions from different years. How did those sessions come about?

Well, like the Stan Getz sides with Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter and Art Blakey and Tony Williams . . . CBS used to have the 30th Street Studios. It was a big old church. Great studios. I heard Stan Getz was recording down there. It was a nice sunny Saturday afternoon. I said, “I’m gonna go down there and just sit in the booth and listen to this.” And sure enough it was great; they were cookin’. A wonderful group and a great sound engineer, Frank Laico. So all of a sudden Stan says on the speaker, “Come on, Tony, come out and sing with us.” I said, “You’re kidding. I just came here to hear you.” He said, “No, do a couple of sides.” And it was just that off-the-cuff, spontaneous kind of thing.

Basie and I just hit it off and we became buddies and I said, “Let’s do something on the road together.” And he said, “Well, come on.” That was that great fifties band that he had with Joe Williams. He was such a wonderful human being and a great humorist. I just loved being around him. He had a great aura about him. He would just look at an audience and they would react. He didn’t have to play a note.

She’s not on the album, but I was on the road with Lena Home for two-and-a-half years. She taught me how to be disciplined onstage. I had all these wonderful teachers. It’s almost like a performer has to fall in love with the whole business. And, funny enough, my peers have treated me so fantastically through the years. Just when I had my darkest periods of doubt, there would always be some entertainer who just lifted me right up by my bootstraps. Sinatra is the number-one guy. He said that I’m his favorite singer. Then Bing Crosby did it. Then Judy Garland did it. It’s even happened with my painting. LeRoy Neiman and David Hockney and Elaine de Kooning, these are the top people in the art world and they’re saying I know how to paint. I say, “Oh, you’re just saying that to make me feel good,” and they say, “Oh, no, you’re a painter, a strong painter. Just keep painting.” And it’s very encouraging. It lifts me up. It gets me inspired.

It seems that there was a lot more of a community of musicians when you were starting out.

There was an incredible scene. You had a land of geniuses. On 52nd Street, where I studied singing with Mimi Spear, a wonderful singing coach, she taught Peggy Lee and Helen O’Connell and Margaret Whiting, you’d look out her window at the awnings and you’d see all these clubs, and you had Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, George Shearing, Stan Getz, Oscar Peterson, Big Sid Catlett, you had Erroll Garner, you had Billie Holiday, all on one little street. You had all the great, great musicians who were famous in the bands. Ralph Bums is a great orchestrator, now of movies and Broadway, but originally he came out of Woody Herman and Count Basie’s band, along with Johnny Mandel and Neil Hefti and Bill Holman. These are the great orchestrators. And everybody found themselves migrating around Ralph Burns. You had Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, Lee Konitz, all these magnificent players on the New York scene. It was just the best group of musicians I ever ran into ever, anywhere.

I loved it. It was a land of geniuses. We were all going somewhere. It was all happening. The audiences were fantastic. In those days they were the boss. Now, because of computers and media push and Madison Avenue philosophies, it’s all into demographics and accountants and people figuring things out. They don’t care whether the public gets it or not. They know the amount of promotion is what’s going to make it go. So it doesn’t even have to be good. It’s an obsolescence philosophy. But in those days they used to listen to the audience and whoever the audience applauded for the most were the ones that got booked. It was primitive, but it was really correct.

There are really a lot of promising young people coming up. The only problem really is that there’s no place, like George Bums says, “for them to get lousy before they get good.” It takes time to hone a good performance. That takes months. Years ago you had a circuit. You left New York and went all around the country and back and by the time you got back you were ready to play the Palace.

Also there used to be more of an accent on individualism. There was a difference between the way Erroll Garner played the piano and Art Tatum played the piano. But today it’s almost like a robot thing. Everybody’s doing the same thing. Things look pretty much alike. Everybody thinks they’re different, but they all look alike. Today, it’s almost like if you do something and it stands out they say, “Hey, you’re out of step here. You’re not wearing a yellow tie. What’s the matter with you?”

Do you remember the first time you heard bop?

Yeah, sure. Charlie Parker at Birdland. I went out in the street and regurgitated. Not in horror. But it moved me so much. I just went in and this guy put a horn in my face. He started playing and it had such intensity, it was so strong, I actually became ill from it, it was so great. It was the best thing I ever heard.

In the liner notes of Jazz, there’s a quote from your teacher Miriam Spires: “Don’t imitate singers, imitate musicians.”

Yes, that’s right. I imitated Art Tatum, the way he made a production out of a simple song. He’d take “Don’t Blame Me,” he’d get a good intro, he’d start with some incongruous tempo. he’d go out of tempo into tempo. It became a production. I liked Stan Getz and Zoot Sims, so I imitated that sound as far as tonal quality. By doing that you don’t sound like Dick Haymes or Frank Sinatra or Mick Jagger or anybody. You sound like yourself.

Who are your favorite female singers?

Ella Fitzgerald is way on top of the list. Then there’s Sarah Vaughan, Peggy Lee, Carmen McRae, Nancy Wilson, Rosemary Clooney. You know that’s something interesting. Girls . . . this is starting to happen to me with tennis, too, by the way . . . but they taught me more than any of the men.

I think there are more great women singers.

I think all women can sing. Even when they say they can’t. They really know how to sing. It’s just physical with them. What we have to learn through Zen, they know it already. There’s something laid back about them. They’re ahead of it, but they’re relaxed. They have a relaxed machine in them. Much more than a man, I think. But maybe it’s just the distortion of a greedy society that makes a man go out and become a slave or something. But who knows? I’m not a psychiatrist or a psychologist, but I was watching Chris Evert last night and she just has a way of hitting the ball that’s just right. It’s not pushing. It’s natural.

I’ve learned a lot from women singers through the years. Sylvia Sims. Mabel Mercer. Dinah Washington. There’s all these good singers and they all sing different.

Do you listen to music when you paint?

Oh yeah. I listen to Bach, I listen to Sinatra, I listen to Louis Armstrong, I listen to myself, I listen to Sinatra. Anything that just hits me nice.

I see that you sign your paintings “Benedetto.” That’s your real family name?

Yeah.

Do you know what it means?

It means “blessed one.”

As I was ready to leave, Tony wanted to play back some of my tape to hear if my recorder had picked up any of the solo cocktail-jazz flugelhorn being blown for spare change down on the sidewalk below Tony’s window.

Clear as a . . . flugelhorn echoing through the midtown rush-hour canyons. Tony was into it. And as I passed the guy on the street, steam oozing out of his horn, I couldn’t tell if he knew Tony was up there listening or not.

That’s show business.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

This article originally appeared in the September 1989 issue of SPIN.

It was a horror movie, evil descending on a New York summer that had begun with a brutal gang-rape in Central Park and a tabloid sideshow of black suspects rapping Tone Loc’s “Wild Thing” in their cell. As the Supreme Court dismantled affirmative action, quietly inflaming the center of American racial tensions, there was madness on the periphery. A black man with ties to Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam clamored, “The Jews are wicked, and we can prove this”; and a young black reporter, a liberal in the employ of Reverend Sung Myung Moon’s right-wing newspaper chain, bolstered his career by circulating and multiplying the hatred he found so repugnant. Outside the posh Ziegfeld Theater on 54th Street in Manhattan, dozens of Jewish militants chanted, “We hate Public Enemy! We hate Public Enemy!” while inside, on the soundtrack to a movie some white critics called an incitement to a race riot, Public Enemy rapped, Elvis was a hero to most/But he never meant shit to me/He’s straight out racist/That sucker was simple and plain/Motherfuck him and John Wayne.

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There were death threats and lies, a militant 27-year-old accountant whose past battle cry still hung in the air: “Louis Farrakhan [has] no right to talk, no right to walk, no right to live.” At the Slave Theater in Brooklyn, Al Sharpton rallied blacks against Jewish pressure on Public Enemy. There was a troubling symmetry: Public Enemy’s logo of a black man in a rifle sight on one side, and the JDO’s logo of a machine gun in a Star of David on the other; and the chic allure of Uzi submachine guns on both.

At the root of the frenzy there was not evil, just mundane human error: four friends from suburban Long Island, whose routine internecine squabbling, once it got away from them, had gotten way, way out of hand. A few commonplace mistakes, made by young men under great duress, had started it all.

“Did you know that the black rap group Public Enemy are anti-Semitic?”

Those were the first words you heard if you called the Jewish Defense Organization’s New York office in June. In a month of intense turmoil and confusion surrounding Public Enemy, this taped message remained one of the few constants. The status of the crew and its members has been changing day to day, but at press time, here’s how things stood: following a barrage of anti-Semitic remarks by Minister of Information Professor Griff in the Washington Times—and subsequently reprinted in the Village Voice—Public Enemy is taking an indefinite hiatus. This followed public statements that Griff would remain in the group, but be stripped of his title (June 19); that he had been fired (June 21); and that Public Enemy had disbanded (June 22). For a number of reasons, lead rapper and writer Chuck D. has refused to stand by his colleague, and refused to disown him. In the course of two weeks, Chuck D. said that Griff was his close friend of 20 years, and that they had never been friends, just professional associates, with Griff his subordinate. Criticized from all sides, and wanting—according to one of his associates and close friends—to be liked by everyone, Chuck D. made the only decision he could: no decision.

In practice, this may mean the end of the most innovative and influential group of the late Eighties. College graduates and proud adults in a genre dominated by teenagers, Public Enemy have changed the way hip hop sounds, the way it is made, what it does. “Chuck might talk 50 percent of his show—and win,” says Daddy-O of the rap band Stetsasonic. “Even if the kids don’t know they want to hear it, ’cause a lot of times they don’t know they want to hear it. And I don’t mean talk and lose, I mean talk and win. Talk and win and then go in the back. And then come back out and then win, and just leave the audience devastated and leave the venue.” The group has spoken in a dozen prisons and hundreds of schools across the country, combining activism and self-promotion in a blueprint for the next wave of black radicalism. As Bill Stephney, former vice president of Def Jam and a close adviser of the group says, in what might as well be Public Enemy’s motto, “The revolution will be marketed.”

In aesthetic terms, as a work of art, the current condition of sustained instability is the apotheosis of all Public Enemy has strived for. It is the hour of chaos extended indefinitely. But this time Chuck D. is the target of his own campaign.

Griff’s remarks capped a year of internal unrest. Last summer, in interviews with the English press, he had repeatedly hurled vicious slurs at Jews, whites and gays. He became the trade’s easiest mark: ask him a question and he would deliver great copy, some of it—not all—doctrine from Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.

It launched a tense but interesting relationship between the group and the press. Journalists who found Griff’s remarks deeply offensive gave him a platform to offend as many people as possible, printing hateful sentiments that were not found in Public Enemy’s music, nor in Nation of Islam doctrine. It was like Lenny Bruce’s 1964 obscenity trial, where, according to Bruce, the prosecution took pleasure in saying the word “cocksucker” as they condemned Bruce for his use of it; everybody enjoyed playing with fire. The group protested that Griff’s words were taken out of context. In separate interviews, when asked to explain Griff’s statement, “If the Palestinians took up arms, went into Israel and killed all the Jews, it’d be alright,” Griff and Chuck D. each put the words into a context which removed their sting. The two contexts, however, were entirely different.

But the bile stayed largely overseas. The group closed ranks, and Griff did no more interviews. When Greg Tate cited some of Griff’s remarks in the Village Voice, Chuck D. denounced Tate as a “porch nigger.” From a New York stage, which he held like Hamburger Hill from an irate Daddy-O of Stetsasonic, Chuck D. lashed into his English critics, calling them blue bloods afraid of the intermingling of the races at Public Enemy shows. Last July, I asked Chuck D. if he backed Griff’s statements. He said that to him, “Jews are just white people, there ain’t no difference,” and seconded Griff’s homophobia. Moreover, though, he said, firmly, “I back Griff.” This became the Public Enemy line: not to let white outsiders divide and conquer them, as had happened with so many radical black organizations. Ignoring reality—as is his habit, according to a colleague—Chuck D. built a strategy and a loud rhetoric on the premise that Public Enemy was united. This was anything but the case.

Inside the group, dissent was brewing. Public Enemy’s relationship with Columbia (Def Jam’s parent label), tentative in the best of times, became more than distant. When the group’s near-platinum second album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, failed to yield hit singles despite steady sales, members felt themselves victims of Columbia’s benign neglect. Some blamed Griff’s remarks for the disaffection.

There were strong outside pressures on everybody. For all his business acumen, Chuck D. had entered into a 1986 partnership by which the group received only one quarter of its royalties, a throwback to the unbalanced contracts of race music. So there was little money coming in. Even though the group’s debut album, Yo! Bum Rush the Show, sold 400,000 copies, and the follow-up better than twice that, Chuck D. had to take a temporary day job at $300 a week to support himself and his wife.

Everything was new to the group members. They were elevated not just to the level of pop stars but to the level of black leaders, a status Chuck D. had courted without being prepared for it. He was also starting a family, juggling a heavy tour schedule with the demands of a pregnant wife, and after October of 1988, a daughter, Dominique. Griff separated from his own wife and moved in with his mother. At the same time, Chuck D. was trying to launch his own label and production company with Stephney and producer Hank Shocklee, the fourth player in this story. By the spring of 1989, when the interview appeared in the Washington Times, the three were negotiating seriously with MCA.

James Hank Boxley gave his first party when he was in the ninth grade. He and his friend from down the block, Richard Griffin, were the DJs. “It was about 1973 or ’74,” he says. “All I remember is everybody had the crazy big afros and platform shoes.” A tall, lanky 31-year-old dressed for Friday night in a black turtleneck and a small gold cross, Hank Shocklee—as he now calls himself—is Chuck D.’s closest friend and business associate.

As a high school student in Roosevelt, Long Island, Shocklee threw his first professional party with money his mother gave him to buy a yearbook and a class ring. “No one came to the party,” he remembers. “I had to explain to my mother what happened to the money she gave me.” After the party, Carlton Ridenhour, two years younger than Shocklee, approached him and explained why it had failed. “He said he did fliers,” Shocklee remembers, “and told me I didn’t understand the science of fliers. I didn’t want to hear about it.” Ridenhour, now Chuck D., had a marketing scheme even then.

As Shocklee continued to throw parties with his brother and Griffin—now Professor Griff—Chuck D. joined as promoter and sometimes MC. His first performance was a hyped-up announcement for a party at the black Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity house at Adelphi University, where he was then an art student. They formed Spectrum City sound system, and began booking top hip hop acts from the Bronx and Manhattan. In 1979, Griff dropped out of music to form a martial arts school and Islamic study group, Unity Force, which later became the Security of the First World, or S1Ws. According to Chuck D., “Hank Shocklee was the Afrika Bambaataa of Long Island. He started it all. When we threw affairs, Griff would have guys dressed up like Black Panthers or FOI [Fruit of Islam], with the berets. And never once did we have one incident. Not because these guys would wax your ass; they earned respect and they treated people with respect. [The S1Ws] all had the same look about them. It was order.” The S1Ws also brought the requisite muscle. At one time in the mid-Eighties, there were close to 300 members.

Bill Stephney, a DJ at Adelphi’s radio station, WBAU, asked to interview Shocklee (then at nearby Hofstra University) and Chuck D. on the air. “It was a pretty strange time,” says Stephney. “You had me, Chuck, Andrew Brown [now Doctor Dre of the Original Concept and a host of ‘Yo! MTV Raps’] and Harry Allen [hip hop music critic who makes a cameo on Public Enemy’s ‘Don’t Believe the Hype’] all in the same classroom. And everybody hated us.” Chuck D. joined the station and got his own three-hour show. He gave the first half of it to his most frequent and enthusiastic caller, a neighbor of Shocklee’s named William Drayton. Drayton—now Flavor Flav, Public Enemy’s second rapper—used his hour and a half to play nothing but crazy homemade tapes of himself.

“Let’s talk about something else, let’s talk about basketball,” says Chuck D., loud, always loud, over the telephone, in the middle of the crisis, a week after announcing that he had disbanded the group. “What happened to Karl Malone and Utah?” A devotee of Motown and, according to Shocklee, nothing else except rap, Chuck D. went to his first hip hop jam by accident in 1976. It was at a public park, half of which was used for the party. He played basketball in the other half. “I’m a sports motherfucker,” he says. “I used to say, ‘I don’t give a fuck about music or the goddamn party, give me the Mets, the Knicks, the Jets, and I’m straight.'” There is a boy’s club element to the friendships in Public Enemy. “Griff used to play on my team when our street played other streets,” says Shocklee. “All of us are into sports, except Bill bowls. Sports and music. We never talk about our personal lives or religion or anything. Even when the problems started, it was never anything personal, because like I said, we never got personal.”

By 1989, the relationship between Chuck D. and Griff began to change. Public Enemy was playing huge arenas, with security provided largely by beefy white off-duty policemen and -women. Griff, who neither wrote nor rapped, became less essential to the crew, and his past tirades in the press—and the risk of recurring—made him a potential liability.

The group began to pull apart. “From the start,” says Stephney, “the basic operation of the group as a business was incorrect. There simply was no real delegation of authority. Duties were not clearly defined, and communication was not clear. And the group members themselves were trying to handle the business end. It was literally anarchy. The guys didn’t talk to each other. Being on the road basically since ’87, the band became very insulated. The developed factions, different loyalties.” When Griff became road manager and got a pay raise, he and the S1Ws stopped talking to each other. The group held a meeting at which Shocklee and others talked to Griff about his ego. As the organization crumbled, Griff and Chuck D. had a basic clash of styles. Griff demanded order; Chuck D. thrived on chaos.

“Griff was supposed to be Minister of Information,” says Shocklee, “but he wasn’t allowed to do interviews. He was supposed to be the road manager, but he wasn’t allowed to manage.”

Griff was seething. Though Chuck D. declares himself, on the single “Don’t Believe the Hype,” a “follower of Farrakhan,” Griff was always much better versed in the teachings of the Nation of Islam, and resented being gagged for interviews. He felt that his role as Minister of Information was to set an agenda for the group, and Chuck D. was stifling him. Griff constantly gave Chuck D. books to read, but the rapper—more kamikaze than theorist or student—never read them; Griff saw this, according to insiders, as Chuck D. turning his back on the truth. At the same time, says Stephney, “We were all deeply aware of the severity of the comments in the English press, and the grave potential consequences of Griff talking to the press. That’s why you didn’t see any interviews for a year.”

People with outside interests in the group urged Chuck D. to fire Griff. Russell Simmons, who heads both Def Jam and Rush Artist Management (but does not manage Griff), denounced Griff as a “racist stage prop”; other Rush staff referred to Griff as poison. Griff soon abandoned his role as tour manager, furious at the lack of organization within the group.

Either on his own or with the consent of the group, Griff started doing interviews. He appeared on Barry Farber’s national radio program and on the “Evening Exchange” television show, aired on Washington’s Channel 32 on April 13. On the latter, when asked why he does not wear a lot of gold like some other rappers, Griff said, “I think that’s why they call it jewelry, because the Jews in South Africa, they run that thing.”

Then came the Washington Times interview.

It was an accident, really. Never good at keeping appointments, and habitually juggling more plans than he can handle, Chuck D. arranged to meet reporter David Mills at the cafeteria of the Comfort Inn in Washington’s Chinatown on May 9, the day of Public Enemy’s second consecutive gig at the 9:30 Club. According to Mills, the rapper had also scheduled a radio interview for the same time, and could not meet with him. Chuck D. later told RJ Smith of the Village Voice, “I refused to talk to this motherfucker…I’m not doing no fucking Washington Times interview.” (The Washington Times is a Moonie paper.) Given Chuck D.’s subsequent relationship with Mills, which was rocky but not silent, this seems like a rationalization made after the fact, when Chuck D. realized, to his embarrassment, that his radical group was falling apart because he had tried to promote it, and thus laid it open to attack, in a right-wing daily. When Chuck D. gathers a head of steam, associates admit, he sometimes makes things up as he goes along.

After Chuck D. left the cafeteria, someone directed Mills to Griff. The two talked for about 40 minutes—during which time Mills found his interviewee disarming—before Mills popped the Jewish question. “It was like pulling the lid off,” Mills says. On demand, Griff launched into the rant that became nearly all of the Times story, as previous rants had eclipsed anything else he might have said in past interviews. Among other slurs, Griff blamed Jews for “the majority of wickedness that goes on across the globe,” citing as one of his sources white supremacist Henry Ford’s The International Jew. According to Mills, even the Times‘ Jewish photographer was charmed by Griff during the interview.

Just over five feet tall and strikingly handsome, Richard Griffin has a reputation for being exceedingly charming and polite or rude, according to his whims. For all his intensity, Griff has the sense of humor and boyish fun that Chuck D. lacks. In his Dapper Dan bootleg designer baseball jacket, with his name in big, gold capital letters across the back, he looks like anything but the ideological monster of his interviews.

At first glance, Griff is Public Enemy’s sideshow attraction, a propagandist agitating in service of a savvy marketing strategy. He leads his uniformed S1Ws onstage in martial dance routines before the rappers, and pumps the crowd up for Chuck D. and Flavor Flav; he keeps a microphone throughout the show, while the S1Ws point plastic Uzis at the audience.

In another sense, Griff is Public Enemy. The S1Ws, as Unity Force, existed well before the group. In their berets, camouflage uniforms and combat boots, the S1Ws gave Public Enemy its identity as forcefully as Chuck D.’s lyrics or logo—a homeboy in a rifle sight, which he fashioned after getting his degree in graphic design. Rapping in an anachronistic baritone voice, Chuck D. shouted messages that, by his own admission, much of his potential audience could never understand. “When I say, ‘Farrakhan’s a prophet and I think you ought to listen’ [on ‘Bring the Noise’],” he told me, “kids don’t challenge the fact that Farrakhan’s a prophet or not. Few of them know what a prophet is.” The S1Ws, by contrast—militant black men armed with machine guns, unity and information—spoke a simple visual message that any black kid could understand. Especially in the early days, before Chuck D. developed as a performer, Griff and the S1Ws also gave the group an element of rock’n’roll theater that set it apart from other rap crews.

It is also possible, if willfully perverse, to construe Chuck D. as Griff’s mouthpiece. Chuck D. has the enormous talent, as a rapper, lyricist, marketing strategist and—perhaps most importantly, in the long run—as a young black entrepreneur. But Griff has the information, or at least some information. His job as Minister of Information, as he defined it in a November 1988 interview arranged in secret from the rest of the group, is to undertake “a re-education of black people,” drawing on the teachings of “Malcolm, Mao Zedong, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Winnie Mandela, Nelson [Mandela] and Minister Farrakhan.” According to Chuck D., “Flavor is what America would like to see in a black man—sad to say, but true. Griff is very much what America would not like to see. And there’s no acting here: sometimes I can’t put Flavor and Griff in the same room.” Chuck D. described his own role to me as “an interpreter and dispatcher” of information, and called the enticing side of Public Enemy—the hyper-inventive music and wordplay—bait for the ideological hook.

Griff and Chuck D. disagreed on whose ideology was the hook. “I build people’s identities one at a time,” says Chuck D. “That’s how we keep the group developing. First it was Flavor. I put a long time into his character. Then it was Terminator X. Third was Griff. On the second album, I gave him the title Minister of Information. I brought him out last year in Europe, gave him his first interviews. I knew it was gonna be some fire, but I stood by him every inch of the way. People always ask what that means, Minister of Information. He had to be something. Like Flavor’s the Cold Lamper. In the next year, I was gonna bring out each of the S1Ws, give them each their own identity.”

In the 13 days between the Washington Times interview and the May 22 issue in which it ran, Shocklee urged Chuck D. to talk to Mills and get him to reshape the story, but Chuck D. declined.

On May 26, Mills faxed his story to Rolling Stone and SPIN, and the Washington Times publicist sent it around the country. The Unification Church reprinted the story on the front page of its May 29 New York paper. Chuck D. handled this problem as he had the others—shortsightedly. He harangued Mills at length over the phone (Chuck D. may be, as he says, “louder than a bomb,” but as anyone who knows him will attest, he is nowhere near as succinct); when he learned that Mills was preparing a follow-up story for SPIN, Chuck D. told him, “I told Leland he better not take it.” Chuck D. denies saying this; Mills has it on tape. (In fact, Chuck D. and I never discussed the assignment.) After the Voice reprinted a large excerpt from Mills’s interview on June 14, Chuck D. called writer RJ Smith, berating him, “Any shit that comes down on me, it’s gonna come down on you. And that’s a goddamn threat…I ain’t gonna write no goddamn whiteboy liberal letter to the editor, no article either.” (He was, it appears, going to attack Smith in song, as he had earlier written “Bring the Noise,” he says, about me.)

The actual circumstances of the interview play out Public Enemy’s problems in microcosm. Having gotten himself into a situation he could not handle (scheduling himself for two simultaneous interviews), Chuck D. tried to lie and bully his way out of the ensuing problems, rather than confront them, and ended up just throwing fuel on the fire.

These threatening phone calls were ineffectual machismo, and a gross miscalculation of the forces that had been stirred up. Before the Voice piece ran, Chuck D. told Smith, “The shit storm hasn’t even begun yet.” After June 14, when the story was no longer confined to a small right-wing paper, the storm began in earnest. Griff had all but dared Jews to send “their faggot little hit men” against him; it was the sort of challenge that rarely goes unanswered.

Mordachai Levy, born Mark, has the look and voice of a nerdy kid grown into a nerdy 27-year-old. An accountant by trade, in 1981 he was arrested in connection with a bombing near the Soviet mission in Los Angeles, and again for allegedly attacking reputed Nazi war criminal Boleslavs Makovskis. He paid a fine for the second incident, but never served time for either.

The following year, at the age of 20, he formed the Jewish Defense Organization. At the time, Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League, which had been strong in the late Sixties, was beginning to deteriorate. Levy’s slogan is “Every Jew a .22.” A better slogan, he said, “is ‘Every Jew an M-1,’ but it doesn’t rhyme.” The organization’s logo is a machine gun inside a Star of David. He formed the JDO, he says, “to help Jews fight against their enemies in the United States: anti-Semites, Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, the Communists. Lyndon LaRouche and Louis Farrakhan have no right to talk, no right to walk, no right to live.”

At JDO meetings, Levy provides rifle and shotgun license applications, and also offers courses in weapons training. These courses, given on occasional Sundays, include practice with Uzi submachine guns. At a meeting attended by a reporter from Present Tense magazine, a young woman spoke up that “All blacks despise Jews.” Since Farrakhan said—in a remark widely quoted and routinely taken out of context—”Hitler was a great man,” he has been a target of JDO oratory. (He actually said, “Hitler was a great man, but wicked,” meaning only that he was powerful; Farrakhan devotes more energy to excoriating Christians, particularly black Christians, than he does to Jews.)

When Griff’s remarks appeared in the Voice on June 14, complete with references to the Nation of Islam, Levy responded with an organized campaign to persuade retailers and distributors to boycott Public Enemy products. Mailing out photocopies of the Voice piece to 200 record stories, the JDO included leaflets reading, in part, “If you’re white, if you’re Jewish, if you’re a decent American, or if you’re black and against Farrakhan, PUBLIC ENEMY IS YOUR ENEMY…We are organizing a boycott of Public Enemy and their materials. WE HAVE TO STOP THESE BIGOTS AND ANTI-SEMITES ANY WAY WE CAN!” According to one store owner, who called me and said he readily supported the boycott, JDO members forcefully told more reluctant retailers that “it would be a good idea” not to carry Public Enemy records. The number he left turned out to be a non-working number—one of many bogus calls.

Demonstrators chanted “We hate Public Enemy! We hate Public Enemy!” outside the opening of Spike Lee‘s “Do the Right Thing,” for which the group’s new single, “Fight the Power,” provided the soundtrack. (Lee directed PE’s “Fight the Power” video, which features a surprise cameo by Tawana Brawley. In perfect synch with the group’s deliberate blurring of the lines between news, entertainment and propaganda, Brawley appears in the video as a happy celebrity, crowned by her weeks in the news.) Public Enemy sat out the premiere, feeling helpless against the disruption they had caused Lee. As “Fight the Power” promised to become both the best-selling 12-inch in the history of Motown and one of the most controversial, Chuck D. also felt disappointed. “I was looking forward to spending the summer talking about Elvis Presley and John Wayne.”

Russell Simmons started receiving threatening phone calls at home, anonymous callers saying, “We know where you live,” or “We know where your parents live.” Persons claiming to be Simmons and a Musician magazine reporter called SPIN to harangue Senior Editor Joe Levy (no relation) about Public Enemy; both pressed Levy on why Jews, himself included, lacked the courage to stand up to Public Enemy. The Simmons caller announced Public Enemy’s dissolution and cited pressure from Columbia as the cause. He also said, prematurely, that the MCA deal was off, and cited an alleged videotape of Public Enemy onstage with Farrakhan at a Madison Square Garden rally, on which Farrakhan said, “Jews, you’re going to the ovens.”

“You can’t argue with a videotape of that,” the caller said, “and 40,000 people applauding.” Farrakhan never made these remarks.

The real Russell Simmons, who blames Griff for the phony call—probably incorrectly—told me that Columbia never put any pressure on the group, either to fire Griff or disband. “The only one putting pressure on them was me,” he said. Stephney confirmed that, far from pressuring the group, Columbia kept its distance, apparently content to let this very successful act fall apart or solve the problem or go into hiding on its own, as long as the company did not have to get involved. (Walter Yetnikoff, CEO and president of CBS Records Inc., and a Zionist, found himself in a sticky position. Recently embarrassed before his new Sony employers by a New York Times article about CBS’s slipping status in the industry, Yetnikoff saw one of his more successful and promising acts publicly calling Israel the evil empire.)

Stores began calling Def Jam and Rush Artist Management, saying they would never carry another Public Enemy item; these calls, it later turned out, were not really from stores at all, but from imposters hoping to undermine the group. Sixty JDO members with baseball bats reportedly stormed Elizabeth Street in search of the Rush office, but now this seems like more disinformation.

In Washington, David Mills was flooded with mail from anti-Semitic organizations, supporting Griff and chastising Mills for his apparent solidarity with the Jews.

Both of Public Enemy’s publicists, irked more by Chuck D.’s obstinacy than by Griff’s anti-Semitism, refused ever to work with the group again, but both continued to do just that. A Jewish independent publicist, approached by the group in a typically heavy-handed stratagem, declined to represent what she called “DJ Jewhaters.” Mordachai Levy announced on a nationally syndicated radio talk show that Public Enemy had disbanded as a result of pressures brought following meetings he had initiated between himself and high-level record company executives.

One of the quiet ironies inflaming the situation was that Public Enemy had always drawn more support from the white media than the black media. From the start, college radio stations, rock’n’roll magazines and MTV embraced the group while black radio, magazines and Black Entertainment Television kept their distance. So to the extent that the group’s name meant anything, once the trouble started, they were already in the enemy’s court. Accusations flew everywhere. By late June, it was impossible to tell whom or what to believe.

The group kept changing its story daily. On Monday, June 19th, Chuck D. told Mills that Griff would remain in Public Enemy, but no longer as Minister of Information or leader of the S1Ws. Two days later, at a press conference at the Sheraton Centre in Manhattan, Chuck D. announced to a small battery of reporters (and anxious MCA and Columbia publicists) that Griff had been fired. Wearing a black baseball hat that he refused to tilt back for the cameras, Chuck D. was uncharacteristically ill at ease, trying to appear humble without looking like he was swallowing something bad. “Offensive remarks by my brother Professor Griff over the past year are not in line with Public Enemy’s program at all,” he said. “We’re not anti-Jewish, we are not anti-anybody. We are pro-black, pro-black culture and pro-human race, and that’s been said before many times. Professor Griff’s responsibility as Minister of Information for Public Enemy was to faithfully transmit those values to everybody. In practice, he sabotaged those values.” All of this, at least in its official version, came as news to both Flavor Flav and Griff, who did not know about the firing until Chuck D. made it public. His most moving comment, lost in the commotion, was that when the press conference was over, he would have to explain his action to the black community. As Stephney tried to close the very brief question-and-answer session, Armond White of the black advocacy weekly, The City Sun, asked Chuck D. if he wasn’t just knuckling under to outside pressure.

Immediately after the conference, in a private room, Chuck D. flew into a rage. He had feared this reaction from black America all along. Under duress like few of us ever experience, he had just fired his friend, in a manner he must have known to be cowardly, for reasons that no one would ever accept. He had done the right thing, or at least a justifiable thing. But he did it too late: a year too late to persuade any but the most generous observers that he was firing Griff for moral reasons, out of umbrage at Griff’s anti-Semitism. He had made no public apologies when the remarks appeared overseas, on a small local TV station, or in a Moonie paper; now that they were on MTV, he was offended. He also ignored his own responsibility in the matter: knowing that, given an opportunity, Griff was likely to attack Jews, Chuck D. gave Griff that opportunity. In his coverage of the conference, White called the dismissal of Professor Griff—as an alternative to addressing the real and thorny issue of historical tension between blacks and Jews—”the most terrible example of sellout I have witnessed in my lifetime.” White called Carlton Ridenhour “another bought, whipped slave.”

It was the worst of scenarios. People Chuck D. did not care about except professionally considered him an anti-Semite for remarks he did not make; it was a charge he would never escape. People he cared about, politically and abstractly, considered him a sellout, maybe a whipped slave. His childhood friend probably considered him a coward and an asshole, a traitor to the truth. And other close friends, as well as close business associates, knew that he had opportunities to defuse the problem altogether, but had either added to it or avoided it.

In private, after the press conference, he disbanded Public Enemy. He made the announcement on MTV and on black radio the following morning.

“We got sandbagged,” he said. “And being that we got sandbagged, the group is over today. It’s out of here…We stepped out of the music business as a boycott of the music industry—management, the record companies, the industry, retailers—[now] everybody [is] involved in the enforcement for us to make a decision for our group instead of us carrying out our disciplining of a person in our group our way.” On the black-owned New York radio station WBLS-FM, he said that the group had been “white balled,” inventing racy marketing copy to the end. Privately, Chuck D. said that Griff sabotaged the group out of jealousy.

Even the announcement that Public Enemy had disbanded did not abate the hysteria, which by now had its own momentum. The death threats continued, as did the flow of contradictory and even false information. Chuck D. told MTV’s Kurt Loder that Columbia “has the next [Public Enemy] album [Fear of a Black Planet], and won’t let it go.” This was patently untrue. Greene Street Studios in SoHo had not even scheduled Public Enemy to begin final work until July, and has since pushed the dates back to August. This was the sort of falsehood that could easily be checked; sources inside Def Jam, Columbia, Rush and PE’s independent publicist all contradicted Chuck D.’s claim. Though he denies this to be the case, part of Chuck D.’s problem all along may be that he expects not to be challenged. For all his belligerence on record and video, in conversation he is a windy but also very friendly man, with his own blunt charm (we met for the first time after he had publicly threatened me on several occasions; in person, he managed to backpedal from his threats without losing face). He is not antagonistic except in private or when surrounded only by allies. He and Public Enemy have taken on giants, but only from a distance; Chuck D. does not show a taste for the give-and-take of debate. (Griff does, and has the resources for it, which may explain why Chuck D. avoided him for so long.) “Chuck’s the kind of guy,” says Shocklee, “that’ll beat your ass, and the next day say, ‘whassup?’ Griff’ll beat your ass and not say anything.”

Around the group, the maelstrom continued to swirl. It was, as critic Robert Christgau pointed out, almost exactly 10 years since Elvis Costello had referred to Ray Charles as “a blind, ignorant nigger” (and 11 years since Mick Jagger had sung, on the title track to the Rolling Stones‘ Some Girls album, “Black girls just wanna get fucked all night,” and easily brushed off the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s attempts to get the group banned from black radio). Public Enemy’s slurs caused a louder bang.

On the group’s behalf, Sharpton announced a June 28 rally at Brooklyn’s Slave Theater to protest the role of Jews in stifling an important black voice, and threatened direct action against Columbia. “I think that unquestionably the whole record and movie industry is controlled by Jews and unquestionably they [Public Enemy] have been targeted by that group,” Sharpton told Smith, just days before being indicted on 67 counts of fraud and misconduct. “Al’s cool,” says Chuck D. “We’ve dealt with him before.” But according to Shocklee, the secretary from Public Enemy’s office sent Sharpton a request to cancel the rally. Even Griff did not attend.

On Friday, June 23, the group performed an unscheduled set at an N.W.A. concert at the Philadelphia Spectrum, announcing that it was their last show ever. Griff was in the wings, but did not go onstage. A week later, they performed again in Chicago—to fulfill a prior commitment, according to Chuck D. While in Chicago, Griff and Chuck D. met with Farrakhan, who reportedly slapped their wrists and told them they were in over their heads, that they were not ready to address the issues they had raised. He also told Chuck D. that if the rapper was going to be a leader, he should lead his group. It was the first sound judgement anyone had offered.

Stripped to its basics, this is a vicious recasting of a familiar rock’n’roll story: petty jealousy and resentment come between friends once they become successful, and a group gets eaten up by its own notoriety. “It was journalistic wilding,” says Stephney, another PE member eager to shrug off responsibility that, as the incident proves, cannot be shrugged off. The same mechanisms that blew the group up larger than life also blew up its mistakes; Public Enemy, like many acts or public figures before them, tried to resolve or ignore those problems as if they still existed on a small scale.

The remaining questions inspire only banal solutions or simple recastings. Why did the group wait so long to fire Griff? According to Shocklee and Stephney, they were all just confused as to why Griff, knowing the severity of the situation, had made the comments. No one was talking to Griff. “Finally I just asked him,” says Stephney. “I said, ‘Do you really believe that Jews cause the majority of wickedness across the globe?’ He said, ‘No that’s silly. I was just having a bad day. I was mad at the group.'” Once they learned this, they say, they moved to fire Griff.

As to whether they knuckled in to outside pressure, the question assumes a faulty metaphor. As a pop act and a business, Public Enemy exists less as an entity than as a series of relationships, some accidental; the polarity between inside and outside does not hold. Chuck D. said his biggest regret was the turmoil he had caused Spike Lee. Shocklee, more emotional, says, “You had death threats in people’s homes. We work in a studio where people bring their babies. What if some crazy person threw a bomb in there? Don’t talk to me about knuckling under.”

Meanwhile, Chuck D. has a short vacation in Roosevelt, his first in a long time. “Over the last two years,” he says, “I’ve spent more time with the group than with my family. That’s changing lately.” He is planning to buy a house in the next few months. He also talks of changing Griff’s status to probation; more than anything, he wants the group back as it was.

The negotiations with MCA are still moving forward. “If you took a poll of black people in Illinois,” says Chuck D., “they wouldn’t know anything had happened. You should go out there and do a survey. My album had its best five-day period while all this was going on. I’m about to have the number-one 12-inch in the history of Motown Records. Everything already is as it was.” It was an encore of the bluster in the face of reality that had allowed all the problems in the first place, or maybe just a little attitude for a reporter. Either way, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back had been selling at around 4,000 copies per week. “That record was dead,” says Russell Simmons.

Fear of a Black Planet is still scheduled for October release, with single, “911 is a Joke” backed with “Revolutionary Generation,” optimistically slated for August, though the group has remained out of contact with Columbia. Chuck D. says he has not made up his mind whether the latter song will be about RJ Smith. Also in the works is a Flavor Flav solo album. “Nobody hates me,” the rapper told Russell Simmons. “I’m Flavor the Friendly Ghost.”

As the incident blew over, at least for the moment, even Mordachai Levy moved on. The new message on his answering machine ran, “Finally, Al Sharpton, the anti-Semitic windbag, has been arrested. Let’s go to the trial and make sure justice is done, and Sharpton is thrown into jail. If you’re interested in marching on his home with us, leave your name and number at the sound of the tone….Sharpton hates Jews, but we hate Al Sharpton. Thank you, and never again.”

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

This article originally appeared in the October 1985 issue of SPIN.

For too long, a lot of excuses have been made for David Crosby. Sadly, that may be part of his problem. This special report doesn’t offer, or accept, any excuses.

More from Spin:

• THIS IS AMERICA: Twilight of a Merry Prankster
• Nils Lofgren Gets a Lift From Ringo Starr, Neil Young, David Crosby on New Solo LP
• Neil Young and Stephen Stills Join Forces at L.A. Autism Benefit

Marin County, California. The rich farmland rolls past, dotted by flocks of grazing goats and sheep and clapboard barns with their red paint peeling in the sun. An occasional tractor lumbers by on a blacktop road, the driver lazily waving hello from the cab.

About 15 miles outside Novato, California, in a particularly deserted spot, a gravel driveway bends off a backwoods road, leading to a gray house fortified with security cameras. It’s here, after a week of cryptic phone calls and suddenly canceled appointments, that I’m supposed to meet with David Crosby. The former member of the Byrds, and partner of Stills, Nash, and Young, who’s been called an “American Beatle” for writing such classics as “Long Time Gone” and “Guinnevere,” has arranged the meeting through his business manager, Jack Casanova. Yet repeated knocks on the front door bring no response. Though several cars are parked in the driveway, my shouts go unanswered. Nothing stirs. Suddenly a cat jumps onto a window ledge and peers through the Levolor blinds.

The silence lasts about 20 minutes. Then a burly, shirtless man with a hairy, sagging paunch appears at the front door. “Jack Casanova,” he says, and he invites me into his house. “David will be out in a few minutes. Sit down. I’ll put the VCR on. Enjoy yourself.” And as he disappears into the rear of the house, a porno film flickers onto the screen.

I wait. Instead of following the nude acrobatics on TV, I watch the tabby edge across the living room. Carefully sliding past Oriental vases, low-slung leather sofas, and other modern furnishings, it curls up contentedly in a corner and drifts off to sleep.

I’m not as comfortable. Tired of waiting, I leave the house and walk around outside. Thirty more minutes go by. As the sun sets, a Mercedes pulls into the driveway, and a well-dressed couple enters the garage. When I go back inside, the house is deeply quiet. An emaciated, barely dressed woman eventually strolls into the kitchen, grabs a bag of potato chips, and vanishes behind a sliding door. She giggles childishly as the door slams shut.

David has been arrested four times on various drug and weapons charges since 1982. Invariably escaping long-term incarceration, he’s retained an aura of ’60s lawlessness, a romantic bad-boy image that boosts his value on the revival circuit.

But David’s continued freedom is always in doubt. He was busted in a Dallas rock club in 1982 for possession of a quarter gram of cocaine and a loaded .45. His 1983 conviction on these charges was later overturned on a legal technicality, but last June a Texas appeals court reinstated the original verdict. A five-year jail sentence now hangs over his head while his case is again appealed, but attorneys’ fees, coupled with years of expensive drug use and repayment of a $3 million debt to the IRS, have plunged David into murky financial waters. A group of shadowy financial backers supports him and during the recent CSN tour, they carefully monitored all interviews to promote the notion that the “new” David is drug-free. Yet, on several occasions he has barely escaped torching himself to death while freebasing.

“When David set fire to his hotel rooms, I paid the bills out of my pocket. I just wanted to keep everything going,” says Michael Gaiman, president of the Cannibal Agency, who booked a Crosby tour in 1984. “I didn’t want David to get arrested. People would say half-kiddingly that he’s down from 7 grams to 2 grams a day, but he and his girlfriend Jan Dance were going to hell arm in arm. I’ll never forget, after he torched his suite in the Vista International [in New York], Jan was sitting there shaking, the wall was scorched, the sheets burnt, and David looked like he hadn’t bathed in weeks. He said, ‘You gotta help me, man, you gotta help me, man.'”

A door bangs shut and a disheveled, unshaven figure staggers into the living room. David has finally appeared. His stomach is bloated; his thinning, frizzy hair leaps wildly into the air. A few of his front teeth are missing, his pants are tattered, and his red plaid shirt has a gaping hole. The most frightening thing is his pale, swollen face, riddled with thick, white scales, deep and encrusted blotches that aren’t healing. Looking at him is painful. A 14-year addiction to heroin and cocaine has caused David to resemble a diseased Bowery bum. The spiritual leader of the Woodstock Nation is now a vision of decay.

David slumps into a chair. “Getting sad and missing people who aren’t there anymore is the worst,” he says. “Do you know that ‘Each man is an island’ thing? That’s no joke, man, everybody is. I’m alone a lot. I don’t handle it well at all. I’m not good at it. I’ve lost a lot of friends, musicians. I’ve lost an old lady too, Chris, Christine Hinton, she was killed in an auto accident. I wrote a number of things that refer to her—’Guinnevere,’ ‘Where Will I Be’ . . .  I miss so many people — Cass Elliot, Jimi Hendrix, Janis. Lowell George was a dear friend of mine. There’s an enormous list of folks . . .

“I’m sad, very sad, but I don’t have the urge to go over the edge. The French have a phrase, raison d’etre, a reason for being, and I have several strong reasons for living. There’s my music—look at what they gave me to work with [a reference to his strained voice]. My daughter, sailing, all the adventures I haven’t been on yet, all the music I haven’t written or sung yet. Almost nothing makes people happy, man, there’s very little in this world that really makes people happy, and I can. I can pull off that magic trick by myself sometimes. I love doing that. I love it when we sing ‘Teach Your Children’ and get 20,000 people singing it. People are touched and moved by that. It changes them, it changes how they feel. They’re less alone.”

Joel Bernstein, David’s long-time friend, earlier had said he doubted that David could still perform that magic. “The drug’s become very big in his vision. It is so important to him, getting it, processing it . . . I think he’s done more coke than anyone in this country. He’d deny that and say music was more important. But the drug was definitely affecting his music. . . . He was abusing his nostrils so much, damaging them so much. I’ve done harmonies with David, and I’ve seen how the drugs affect his performance. The real tragedy of David is the fact that his musical potential has been so impeded.”

Drugs have reduced David’s voice to a whisper. Every word is a strain on his throat. Where there was once hope, there is now the vocal equivalent of coarse sandpaper, a dull, flat rasp.

“I quit completely,” says the 44-year-old Crosby as he grabs for a bag of Pepperidge Farm cookies.

“You gave up coke?”

“Yeah!”

“Heroin?”

“Yeah!”

“You were doing coke and heroin?”

“I’d rather not talk about that. Coke I’ll admit to. And I did quit, completely. It changed things considerably. I’m not into it at all on the level I once was. I don’t . . . for the most part I don’t do it. I’ll agree with them [Bernstein, Graham Nash, Jackson Browne, and others who came to David’s house in 1983 to persuade him to seek help]. I was too much into it.”

Looking pained, David stares vacantly ahead. Disregarding the laughter in another room, he resumes, “I do good work, I want to work with those guys [Stephen Stills and Graham Nash]. I love them. . . . Drugs wouldn’t hurt my working with them now. Things have changed.”

Suddenly, a note of exasperation creeps into his voice. Looking beseechingly at me, he cries out, “Do we have to talk about drugs? Can you believe it, five years for less than a gram. I won’t get out of that state alive. I’ll die in one of those jails. . . . I don’t want to talk about drugs. It’s been used against me so many times. I just want to talk about my music.”

David’s eyes close; his head drifts into a slow nod. One eye barely opens when I ask him to describe how the Byrds broke up. He mumbles a few words and quickly falls back into a stupor.

I prod him a number of times. He comes to and without a word rises and stumbles to the door separating the two wings of the house. He pauses there for a moment, smiles wanly, then disappears. And I’m left sitting there, stunned.

Death and ruptured friendships have made David a lonely, wrenchingly sad figure. Tragic or premature losses dog him. His mother died of cancer. Christine Hinton, the 21-year-old woman he was passionately in love with, died in a violent 1969 car crash. Since the late ’60s, he’s been estranged from his father, Floyd Crosby, the Academy Award-winning cinematographer who worked on High Noon and Tabu. Embroiled in a child-support battle with former girlfriend Debbie Donovan, he rarely sees his 10-year-old daughter Donovan Ann. And while David was once surrounded by such artists as Grace Slick, Elvis Costello, and Jackson Browne, his closest friends—Bernstein, Roger McGuinn, road manager Armando Hurley, Paul Kantner, and Jaws 2 screenwriter Carl Gottlieb—have either severed ties or don’t want to talk about him. As CSN tour publicist Bob Gibson admits, “David’s friends have thrown in the towel. It could be that jail is the best place for him.”

Alienated from his friends, David has drifted in and out of a netherworld where only the next fix is important. Desperate for drugs, he has sold musical instruments to raise cash for cocaine. And while this belies his oft-repeated claim that music is his primary concern, his so-called raison d’etre, freebasing is a sickness that has often rendered him helpless.

David’s friends have repeatedly tried to admit him to hospitals, lent him money, and brought drug counselors to his Mill Valley, California, house. But David has disappointed them by rejecting their efforts with contempt or by agreeing to seek help and then fleeing from clinics.

“We’ve tried to do everything short of imprisoning him, but David looks down on almost all of his friends. He thinks he’s the king of the world,” said Jefferson Airplane cofounder Paul Kantner in 1984. Suggesting that people shouldn’t feel sorry for David, Kantner continued, “If you take a thoroughbred horse, pamper and feed him all the fat grains and wonderful milks all day, pretty soon he’ll be a big fat horse who can’t run . . . and the same with musicians. If you put them in mansions, feed them steaks, you’re going to have some big fat guy à la David Crosby pushing shit into his arm and doing nothing but dying. I’m sad he’s put himself in the position he’s in. But he’s been an asshole even to his friends. Now no one accepts him, and he doesn’t want to be around us because we’ll tell him, ‘David, please stop.’ I hate to say it, but the boy’s a dead man.”

“David’s whole life has the earmarks of Belushi’s death,” says Armando Hurley, David’s confidant for 12 years.

Before John Belushi died alone at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, there was a battle for his soul. While friends tried to help him, agents and producers had more self-serving agendas for the comedian—and to make sure he delivered, they kept Belushi’s coke supply lines open. A similar fight rages around David. On one side there are people like Graham Nash, who is tirelessly devoted to David, both emotionally and financially. David’s Dan Aykroyd, Nash has patiently shrugged off David’s frequent outbursts (“You’re not my conscience” is one of David’s favorite lines), rescued him from jail cells, and sheltered him in his Hawaii home. Though a CSN tour is worth considerably more than either a Nash or Stills solo (booking agent Gaiman says that together they can demand $75,000 a night, compared with $15,000 to $25,000 for only one of them), Nash seems to genuinely care about David, whom he calls “Boy David.”

But there are other forces competing for control of David’s life—the drug dealers, financiers, and music people who see David only as an investment and have little or no interest in his health, and the Marin County motorcycle gangs and underworld types who supply him with coke and heroin.

And while David’s financial backers want to keep him alive so he’ll pay back old debts or generate income, they can hardly choke off his drug supply. If they took a strong stand, David could either find new “friends,” circumvent their safeguards, or simply stop performing for them. Besides, under the influence, he’s far more gentle and accommodating.

“The only people David deals with outside of Graham are a fucking mess. All they want from his whole trip are drugs or some kickback,” says Joe Healy, road manager for David’s 1984 solo tour. “Before the tour began, this guy I didn’t know comes into the house I’m renting, and while I’m on crutches he jumps me and kicks my ass. We go through the whole tour, and this backer comes up and says, ‘I need a recording session from you guys.’ I look up and it’s the mother who jumped me. . . . You don’t want to know his name. It’s just too much of a stone to upturn. He threatened to kill me. He’s a sicko.

“David owes this guy about $250,000. After the CSN tour this summer, David could pay this guy off and walk away with some of his possessions. But right now David’s not strong enough to walk away. You have to understand, David’s sick, and he’s in the hands of the wrong people.”

When a bank threatened to foreclose on David’s house, a man named Jack Casanova came up with the money to help him. Pudgier than Lou Costello and equally squat, the nearly bald, bearded Casanova also gave David the money to record a yet-unreleased album and has helped him pay other debts. A self-described “dabbler” in real estate and other business ventures, Casanova says he has known David for 10 years and is a great fan.

Casanova ignored several requests to be interviewed until this past July, then blamed CSN management (the Crosslight Agency) for not relaying my messages to him. He describes himself as David’s right-hand man, but remains a mysterious figure.

“Jack seemed to know nothing about rock ‘n’ roll,” says Michael Gaiman. “[On the ’84 tour] he never asked about gross potentials, contracts, percentages, nothing. I’d explain the dates, the grosses to him, and you would expect some input. But I didn’t get anything from him . . . I asked around about Jack and a pal of his who carried around this silver case and always seemed tooted up, and it became clear that they hadn’t been in the music business before. So I had to wonder how they got to be working with David.”

While under Casanova’s care on the ’84 tour, David left a trail of hotel wreckage behind him. Unable to control a propane torch—the basic tool of freebasing—he burned his room in New York’s Vista International, damaged furnishings at the Yankee Pedlar in Torrington, Connecticut, and burned the interior of his tour bus.

After these incidents, David resembled a character out of a B horror movie. Covered with blood and spittle, he’d vacantly glare at people. Angry hotel keepers wanted him arrested. Casanova indifferently shrugs off these episodes.

“David does owe me some money, because he owed a lot of money to the [CSN] partnership, and he had overspent on tours,” Casanova says. “He had some tax liens, and he had to take care of those [David has paid $3 million to the IRS over the past 10 years]. I put together some investors, who bought David’s house. David has an option on his house—it’s no longer in his name. But he still lives there, and he makes the payments. He still owes some money [to the IRS], he just paid off a $74,000 lien, and that took care of a great deal of his taxes.”

What about the stories that the people around David are violent and shadowy?

“That’s ridiculous. There’s no violence in any of these people or me. And there’s no record of any violence whatsoever. If there’s some hearsay story about something, I have no idea what it might be.

“I get paid, I get paid quite well. David has given me part interest in the masters on some of his new tunes. There’s no debt to me other than what he promised to pay me and was not able to because of previous debts. David owes me money because I’ve not been paid what he’s promised to pay me for aiding him, consulting him, helping with his house, and so on.”

His voice alternating between anger and frustration, Casanova says he saved David’s relationship with CSN. “I talked to Graham [before the 1984 CSN tour], and he said, ‘Look, I love David, but I’m never going to play with him ’til he’s clean. And Stephen’s scared.’ On the [1983] European tour, and the tour before that, David had musicians out in the street looking for drugs for him. He spent a great deal of money, far more than Stills and Nash, which he had to recoup. In fact, at the beginning of the last tour he still owed the partnership $56,000, which he repaid. I told Graham that now that his house had been saved David seemed to have enough financing, that he could do basically what he wanted to do on the tour, that he wouldn’t be sending people out and endangering the whole band, that he cut his drug intake down to between a third and a half of what it was. Everyone was kind of negative about David.”

Casanova claims the CSN management company’s two bosses, Bill Siddons and Peter Goldin, betrayed David. “Listen, we seldom ever saw them on the tour. They’re not on the [’85] tour. I think they’re doing a shitty job. Why? They’re not paying enough attention to the management of David. I would like them to take more of an interest in who David Crosby is. They’ve told a lot of people that David doesn’t look as good now as before he went into the hospital. They’ve made decisions without David and me. They’re not going to be David’s managers very long, that’s what it amounts to.

“It’s really easy to see who’s interested in money and who’s interested in the act first and the money second. David had some heavy, heavy legal fees to pay, and his expenses aren’t small. David was short of money, especially at the beginning of the [1984] tour—he was broke. [Siddons and Goldin] assumed that every time David wanted a thousand dollars he was going to buy some dope. And they wanted to play lecturer to him. He had to put out as much as $20,000 to $25,000 at one time to have his attorneys continue in Texas, because he was behind in paying. And they all sat down with me one night and they were telling me how much they loved David. So when David had to send all this money to Texas to keep his attorneys working, not one of them said, ‘Look, I’ll put up a couple thousand bucks. I stand to make another $50,000, I’ll put up $2,000.’ Not a goddamned penny. Who was at that meeting? Siddons, Goldin—all the honchos, all the well-paid folks.”

Vaguely remembering that meeting, Siddons says, “Our track record speaks very clearly. We have always shown deep concern for David and what we feel is best for David. We were never asked to participate in paying David’s legal expenses, and we’ve never asked him to help pay ours. We’ve always looked out for David’s interests and will continue to do so.”

Yet Armando Hurley, who became so disgusted with the “slimebags” surrounding David that he left the CSN entourage in 1984, insists, “I couldn’t handle any of these guys anymore. I got into this terrible argument with Siddons over drugs. I can’t talk about the specifics, but our ethics are a lot different. Bill Siddons is only interested in Bill Siddons. I think he thinks David is a pain in the ass.”

Bethel, New York, August 17, 1969—The phone rings at midnight in Michael Lang’s production office backstage at Woodstock. An assistant takes the call and, crestfallen, relays the news to festival organizer Lang.

“They’re not coming. They’re stuck at the fucking airport in New York.”

The Aquarian Age is dawning without CSN&Y. While over 400,000 faithful listen to Joan Baez, the Who, and Jefferson Airplane during a driving rainstorm, David and the other members of the group can’t get transportation to the upstate New York festival. Finally convincing an airline representative to rent them two planes, the group defies the weather and arrives backstage at Woodstock around 3 AM.

They quickly strut out front. Stills exclaims to the mud-soaked, LSD-imbibing crowd, “You gotta be the strongest bunch of people I ever saw.” Then CSN&Y begin what will become among the most famous first bars of a rock anthem, the tripping guitar intro to “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.”

The applause is deafening.

CSN&Y are now the heralded leaders of the Woodstock Generation.

And David Crosby is the group’s driving force.

Though arrogant and volatile, he had been a leader before with the Byrds. There had been trouble, ugly spats with the other Byrds. But he moved on, became Joni Mitchell’s producer, her guiding spirit, and even her lover.

In those halcyon days, David only smoked marijuana and dreamed of owning a sailboat. Friends saw him as an innocent yet committed musician. When Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, he was shocked into writing “Long Time Gone.” To John Sebastian, Grace Slick, and Eric Clapton, David was an inspiration, the long-mustached, flowing-red-haired figure they adoringly called “Yosemite Sam.”

Winning such esteem was a struggle for David. Both as an adolescent and as an early-’60s rocker, he faced innumerable obstacles. And the torments on the way to Woodstock, the estrangement from his family, and personality clashes with fellow band members left their scars.

His childhood was especially tormented. The son of a celebrated cinematographer who socialized with Roger Corman, John Huston, and other Hollywood icons, David felt the pressure to succeed—or to “match up.” Shattered by his parents’ divorce and unable to conform in school, he became the quintessential ’50s juvenile delinquent. As a teenager in Santa Barbara, he broke into cars and houses and, most troubling of all to his father, played folk music at beatnik coffeehouses.

“Floyd basically turned his back on David. He wasn’t interested in his son’s music, and that hurt David,” says Chris Hillman, one of David’s friends from the Byrds. “How could David like himself? He came from a real unstable family.”

Floyd Crosby still thinks his son made grave mistakes. Now 85 and living quietly in Ojai, California, where his main pastime is gardening, Floyd says, “David had success, but he got caught up with drugs. This meant a lot of trouble. I talked to him about drugs, but it didn’t do any good. I haven’t seen him in three years.”

In 1960, hoping to please his father, David enrolled at the Pasadena Playhouse acting school. Compelled to “kiss ass” and to “fake” his true feelings, the outspoken, quick-tempered David soon dropped out to play blues guitar at the Unicorn in L.A. After getting his Hollywood girlfriend, Cindy, pregnant, he fled to New York, learned a new playing style from folk singer Fred Neil, and hitchhiked around the country. He lived with Dino Valenti, later of the Youngbloods, on a houseboat in Sausalito, but finally returned to L.A. in 1963. At a Troubadour club hoot, Roger McGuinn and Gene Clark were impressed with David’s “fresh, energetic voice” and asked him to join their group, the Jet Set, which later became the Byrds.

In 1964, the Byrds recorded Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and took off. But as their stature grew, David began competing with McGuinn for control of the group.

“There was always a rub between me and David. He had to be on top, and this rivalry often turned ugly in the studio,” sighs McGuinn, recalling the time drummer Michael Clarke was angered by David’s “shit” and punched him in the face. “The tension hurt the Byrds terribly. We’d be searching for material and fights would break out. They got physical, and David was often at the center of them.”

David was experimenting with cocaine by the mid-’60s, and emblematic of this interest, he collaborated with McGuinn to write “Eight Miles High.” But hostilities peaked in 1967, when the Byrds refused to record David’s song about a menage à trois, “Triad.” McGuinn said the lyrics were “immoral.” Angered, David complained that the Byrds were “canaries” who stunted his musical growth.

“David thought I was censoring him, that I was mindless and unhip because I was into Eastern religions,” says McGuinn. “But ‘Triad’ was simply a bad song, and David had just become too tough to deal with. There was bad blood between us, so Chris Hillman and I asked him to leave. David said, ‘Come on, guys, we make good music together.’ But I told him, ‘We make good music without you.'”

David was already hanging out with Stephen Stills. The Byrds gave him a $50,000 settlement, and with it he bought a boat, the Mayan. Inspired by idyllic trips on the Mayan, David teamed with Stills and Paul Kantner to write the revolutionary anthem “Wooden Ships.” It was the beginning of the historic group that would become CSN&Y.

In 1968, David fell in love with a wispy, blonde-haired California girl named Christine Hinton. Luxuriating on beaches or swimming naked in Monkee Peter Tork’s Laurel Canyon pool, the couple epitomized the Aquarian Age. They enjoyed life, and in this beatific spirit, David sang harmonies with Stills and Nash at Joni Mitchell’s house. “We knew we’d locked onto something so special,” David told writer Dave Zimmer.

The world soon felt the same way. In 1969, their debut album, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, featured “Long Time Gone,” “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” and “Marrakesh Express.” It sold 2 million copies. The album had a lilting, soothing quality that was a stark contrast to the frenetic politics of the era. CSN was likened to the Beatles by the American counterculture, and Jimi Hendrix raved, “These guys are groovy . . . western sky music. All delicate and ding-ding-ding-ding.”

The euphoria persisted all the way to Woodstock. Together with Neil Young, who joined the group shortly before the festival, the group made their second live appearance as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young at Max Yasgur’s farm, and the “music and arts fair” cemented their reputation as love children.

Still enraptured by Christine Hinton and hailed as the group’s driving spirit, David was excited by life. Happier than he’d ever been, he didn’t use “peace and love” as mere buzzwords. To him, the phrase had real meaning as he stood poised to lead the Movement to an even higher consciousness.

As my wait for David grinds on, I sit in that eerie Novato house—30 minutes have passed . . . 40 . . . 50 . . . —wondering what happened to him—and the revolution. During that apocalyptic era, protestors marched to his music, echoed his calls for freedom. David and the forces of rebellion were intertwined. Then and now. For his weakened condition, which has forced him into a back room to revive, is symbolic of the lost Revolution.

David reappears, mysteriously rubbing the edge of a large brass bowl with a wooden cylinder. His slow, circular strokes make the bowl reverberate, and a shrill, piercing hum fills the room.

“That’s nice, eh,” says David. “It’s Tibetan. It drives the bad Mojo out of the room.” His eyes are bleary, the sound is annoying. “Anyone who’s bad has to leave. I haven’t been to Tibet, but I’ve seen pictures of the people’s faces. They’re all happy, they’re still free, they haven’t been conquered. That’s why I’d like to get there.”

Woodstock was also an uplifting experience, he cheerfully exclaims. “That was good, man, real good. We didn’t realize at the time what was going on quite as much as we did later. But it was amazing for us, because we were just starling out. Everybody in the entire music business that we respected was standing all around us, looking to see what we were going to be. And we were nervous. Everybody was there, the Who, Hendrix, everybody, the Airplane . . . it was quite something. It was good, man.

“We [CSN&Y] were all good writers. We had this incredibly wide palette to paint the albums from. Those days were the best, man. We were doing work that we thought was absolutely the best of our lives, and it probably was. We were tight buddies. I love Stills, and Nash has been my best friend for many, many, many years, and still is. He’s one of the best men I know in the world. We played for the right reasons, because we loved it. Music was our whole life, the main joy in our life. It gave us purpose . . .”

David’s voice trails off mournfully, and he moves to the window to stare at a lone farmworker on a distant hillside. He’s trying to hide the tears glistening in his eyes. But like the shadows creeping over the surrounding fields, David is enveloped by darkness, the darkness of a past suddenly clouded by tragedy.

On September 30, 1969, only a month after his Woodstock “high,” David was frolicking with Nash, Christine Hinton, and other friends by the pool in back of his Marin County home. Chris rolled a few joints. Carefree and high, she gathered up their four cats and put them in David’s ’64 VW bus and drove off to the veterinarian. On the way, one of the cats suddenly jumped onto her lap. The VW swerved into the path of an oncoming school bus. On impact, Chris flew through the windshield. She died a short time later in a hospital emergency room.

“I don’t think David ever recovered from that accident,” says Armando Hurley. “It was one of those ideal love affairs; he thought she was perfect for him. She was his utopia. The loss was very heavy. It hung over him like a ball and chain in his life.”

The inspiration for “Guinnevere,” Christine represented David’s non-drugged, creative side. He eulogized her in “Laughing” (“And I thought I’d seen someone / Who seemed at last / To know the truth / I was mistaken / It was only a child laughing in the sun / Ah! In the sun”), and “Deja Vu.” David made the arrangements for Christine’s cremation. Afterwards, he carried a deep guilt over her death.

David is standing forlornly by the window. “‘Deja Vu’ was my song, and I’m proud of it. This was a different experience for me. After Chris died I’d go to the studio and just sit on the floor and cry.”

David was in a stupor for months. He didn’t regain his sense of purpose until May 1970, when four Kent State students were killed during a campus demonstration. Calling that incident a nightmare, he speaks with new clarity, a passion that’s reminiscent of the old David.

“I remember handing Neil [Young] Life magazine, and he looked at the pictures of the girl kneeling over the guy dead on the pavement, looking up with that ‘Why?’ expression on her face. I saw the shock of it hit him. I handed him his guitar and helped him write ‘Ohio.’ I got him on a plane, took him to L.A., and we recorded that night. By 1 o’clock in the morning we passed the tape to Ahmet Ertegun, the president of Atlantic Records, and got on a plane to New York. It was out in three days. And we point the finger, we could say [starts to sing] ‘Tin soldiers and Nixon coming / We’re finally on our own / This morning I hear the drumming / Four dead in Ohio / Gotta get down to it / Soldiers are cutting us down . . .’

“It was a bitch, and to be able to put that song out, man, right away [his voice rises again], and have it stand for something, have people stop us in the street and say, ‘Man, right-fucking-on.’ That was exciting. It was good stuff.”

But this peak couldn’t be sustained, and an atmosphere of mistrust and acrimony enveloped Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. The main battle raged between Stills and Nash, who bitterly vied for the affections of Rita Coolidge. Stills fought with Young for the greater share of lead vocals. Young finally settled the issue by going solo. The group flew apart. David left to rejoin the Byrds. CSN&Y re-grouped at other times during the late ’70s, but muses David sadly, “When we got big, music was sacrificed on the altar of ego again and again and again.”

While his eyes remain pained, David fervently insists, “Music is magic, man. There hasn’t been a major magic on the planet since the caveman danced around his fire going ‘ugga-bugga, ugga-bugga.’ Music is what people do when they feel good. It’s a magic, it’s an elevating force in our lives, in our consciousness. It makes us not alone.

“Issues were crystallizing that polarized the country in the ’60s and made everyone think they had to stand up and be counted. Music was a unifying force. ‘Long Time Gone’ seemed to mean a lot to people. ‘Almost Cut My Hair’ seemed to mean a lot. So did ‘Teach Your Children.’

“Apathy overtook everything,” says David, “There are big divisive issues that are tearing the country up. The same people are still running the country, and they’re getting ready to get us into another war. They’ll sacrifice 100,000 people in the blink of an eye. You can smell the new war a-coming.

“It’s sort of a guerrilla warfare that I play, where I try to spot one of those moments when you can affect everything hugely by just one small act, one human being standing up and sticking up for the right thing. I look for those moments. I’m praying I’ll come across one.”

His voice cracks with emotion. Standing up again, he clenches his fists. He then stares at me, and in a barely audible tone, says beseechingly, “I don’t harm anybody, I don’t steal, lie, or cheat, or mess with other people’s old ladies or anything. I’ve tried really hard to be a decent human being. All I do is go around and make people feel good—that’s my whole life’s work, to make people happy. I try really hard to be a positive force.”

But, like that of many flower children, David’s revolutionary ardor cooled in the 1970s. He continued to mourn Christine’s death and retreated to a more private world. He became romantically involved with a woman Hurley describes as “warm, exciting, with a great body.” Charmed by David’s wit and intelligence, she began doing a lot of cocaine. Their relationship flourished until she decided to go straight.

Then David met Jan Dance.

The quintessential Florida beach girl, Jan Dance made heads spin. She was all flowing sandy hair, a carefree smile, girlish innocence, and wholesome good looks. Petite and always laughing, she bounced instead of walked. All the boys agreed: she was perfectly molded for tie-dyed T-shirts.

David met Jan in a North Miami recording studio in 1979, where she was the PR director. He was immediately smitten. He invited her out on his boat. They saw more and more of each other. All was idyllic. With her next to him, he didn’t have to think of Christine. Jan was a rainbow of different colors.

As he had done with several other women, David turned Jan on to cocaine. They began freebasing together, and she soon became his partner in pathos. “Jan’s not the villain here at all, she’s a victim. David got her going,” sighs Armando Hurley. “When I first met her she was so vibrant, so filled with tomorrow. But when David wanted something from women he got it, and now you could put Jan in with the Biafrans. She’s so emaciated, she’s death warmed over.”

The word was spreading quickly. In L.A. and in Marin, David’s closest friends heard that he had a drug problem. In early 1981, the story travelled like a brushfire that while on tour David had twice fallen unconscious after freebasing.

Some members of the music community doubted David would survive the year. Cynics wagered among themselves on when he’d finally do himself in.

Others wanted to help him, but what could be done? One night in 1981, Kantner, Grace Slick, Jackson Browne, Joel Bernstein, and a few others finally decided to act. They confronted David at his house and implored him to enter a drug rehabilitation program. David broke down, tearfully confessing that he had “a severe problem,” and agreed to seek help.

“It was a very emotional meeting; David went through a real catharsis,” recalls Joel Bernstein. “We had this room ready for him at a private hospital, and when he realized that we weren’t talking about his quitting eventually, but that we wanted him to do it right now, he broke down again.

“He eventually said he’d go to the hospital, but insisted on spending one last night in his house. After we resolved this, David went back to his room and started freebasing! It seemed as if he just wanted to stall us, that he was only interested in getting to his bedroom. Nash got very angry at him. I think he realized that David was acting in front of us, that he was playing the role of someone needing help. But he wanted to stop the conversation so he could freebase.

“Well, the next day Jackson brought him down to the Scripps Institute in La Jolla and got him admitted. But one day later David walked.”

Having angered and alienated his friends, David found himself increasingly alone. Now only Jan was by his side, and she had her own cocaine problem. David began hanging out with street people in Mill Valley. Ever afraid of getting busted or hurt, David became acutely paranoid.

“David has always loved guns, but as the drugs intensified, his fear of dying or being murdered was amplified,” says Hurley. “The John Lennon thing really shook David up. He thought it was a gross insult to humanity, and the whole idea of being killed by a fan freaked him right out. So he always had a gun with him.

“Then, when Belushi died, it really shocked him. Belushi died in bungalow three at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, and that’s where David always stayed! That thoroughly unnerved him.”

As David drove to an anti-nuclear rally on March 28, 1982, cocaine and a .45 revolver were concealed by his side. Nodding off enroute, he crashed into a divider on the San Diego Freeway. When police searched his car he was arrested for possessing methaqualone, cocaine paraphernalia, and the gun as well as for driving recklessly. He was allowed to plead guilty to the driving violation, while the other charges were dropped, and was sentenced to three years probation, fined $751, and ordered to enroll in a drug program. However, this latter stipulation was never enforced. Said one court official, “The guy simply got a slap on the wrist.”

A few weeks later, David was again in trouble. Big trouble.

Desperate for money, even if it meant playing in sleazy bars, on April 13, 1982, David turned up at Cardi’s, a now defunct rock club in the northeast section of Dallas notorious for the numerous shootings and stabbings that had taken place in or around it. That didn’t deter David. He was ready for all sorts of action.

Around midnight, two cops responded to a fight that had broken out in the parking lot outside the club. One cop entered Cardi’s and went backstage. He saw David holding a propane torch in one hand and a pipe in the other. As the policeman approached, David flung aside a green bag that contained coke and a loaded .45 and screamed, “Don’t do this to me, don’t do this to me!”

Hiring two of Dallas’s most celebrated defense attorneys, Jay Ethington and Jerry Banks, David made emotional appeals in court. “Jail is no joke,” he told Judge Patrick McDowell. “Handcuffs are no joke. It’s real serious stuff. It’s been very lonely. I spent a lot of nights lying there thinking about it. Those bars are very real. It certainly frightened me. I don’t want to do anything ever again, ever, that puts me in jeopardy. I want to feel proud of myself and stand for something again.”

But Dallas DA Knox Fitzpatrick wasn’t moved. Fitzpatrick is said to have the mind set of Clint Eastwood. The Texas lawman hardly looks like a law-and-order zealot. He is short and bulging in the middle. But Knox Fitzpatrick is a fit hunter. According to local newsman Steve McGonigle, “Knox thinks David is a dirtball. It’s bothered him that Crosby has gotten off so many times, and that he took this condescending attitude in court. He even fell asleep during the proceedings. So Knox has been dogged. In a sense, it’s become his case, his own personal vendetta.”

While David’s defense team contended that the search was illegal and moved for a dismissal of the case, Fitzpatrick relentlessly plodded ahead. He repeatedly drew attention to the evidence. Cold and dispassionate, he wanted David to do hard time, five years, in a state prison.

On June 3, 1983, Knox Fitzpatrick finally won. David was found guilty. But the legality of the search was disputed in Texas courts and David was freed on bond during the appeal. He told me, “For a thumbnail’s worth of pipe residue they sentenced me to five years. I guess they wanted to make an example of me. I’m scared, man.”

Despite his fears, David continued to freebase on his ’84 solo tour. In October of that year, David was arrested again for recklessly driving his motorcycle in the Marin County town of Ross. Police found in his possession heroin, cocaine, marijuana, a rubber hose tourniquet, a spoon, a torch, a pipe with coke residue, two daggers, a knife, white powder residue on two of the knives, and other narcotics paraphernalia. He was booked on weapon and drug charges. But since the legality of the search was “doubtful,” according to assistant DA Peter Evans, David was only prosecuted for reckless driving. David pleaded guilty to the driving charge (on two previous occasions he had been arrested or cited for a revoked license) and received three years probation and a $1,325 fine.

In Texas, Knox Fitzpatrick heard of David’s rearrest. He intensified his campaign to get David put away. Another hearing was held before Judge McDowell last December, and David was ordered into the drug rehabilitation program at the Fair Oaks Hospital in Summit, New Jersey.

The Fair Oaks Hospital sits at the crest of a gentle hill, surrounded by expansive lawns and rows of manicured trees. Cottages dot the grounds, and while the private, $800-a-day institution, one of the finest treatment centers in the U.S., has locked facilities for psychiatric patients, the quiet retreat looks more like a country club than a hospital.

David entered the hospital last January, and immediately refused to take part in any of the therapy sessions. He repeatedly begged Casanova to take him back to California. According to his counselor, Dr. Stephen Pittel, David would belligerently reject the staff’s overtures, then sob uncontrollably for help, then turn hostile again. He suffered from several illnesses, including edema (his ankles were swollen to four times their normal size), apnea (a condition where breathing stops for 20 to 30 seconds during sleep), and dental abcesses. “He was in tremendous agony,” says Pittel.

During the fifth week of confinement David began to participate in the program. He met with other drug abusers and talked about how addiction had ruined his life. He’d cry grievously during these traumatic sessions. He began composing music for the first time in three years, organized a hospital band, and asked for permission to bring in a synthesizer. The request was denied, but David continued to cooperate with the doctors. Hospital staffers believed David had “turned a corner.” He acted like a man transformed, strolling happily on Fair Oaks’ lawns.

On Sunday, February 24, during one of these walks, a car driven by an unidentified old girlfriend of David’s pulled up to the hospital, and he jumped in. He wasn’t seen for the next 26 hours—not until the New York police arrested him near Greenwich Village for possessing cocaine.

Unable to post a $10,000 bond, David was held at the Tombs and on Riker’s Island. Eventually, he was assigned an attorney from the public defender’s office, but he remained in jail for four days. He appeared at hearings wearing torn and badly stained clothes and barely spoke. From Texas, Knox Fitzpatrick dispatched two deputies to bring David back for having again violated his bond. David meekly submitted to Fitzpatrick’s demands for his extradition.

David was returned to Texas for another hearing on March 8. Dr. Stephen Pittel testified that David had been addicted to heroin and cocaine. Fitzpatrick demanded the revocation of his bail, while both defense attorneys pleaded to have him sent back to Fair Oaks. Judge McDowell, however, denied bond and sent David to the Dallas county jail.

On March 7, David was given a set of white coveralls and locked up in the “tank” that housed seven other inmates. He was made a trustee in the medical ward. For a week he swept and mopped floors in the infirmary and assisted guards in the cafeteria. He was granted other privileges, including the freedom to walk around a dayroom and to eat in the general dining room.

Yet the guards soon had trouble with him. On March 15, David was warned about eating food off the cafeteria carts as he served the other inmates. The following day he missed work and was again reprimanded. Complaining about not feeling well, he came late to work the next four days. David was stripped of his privileges and put in a more restrictive setting.

Confined for most of the day to a 40-square-foot cell, David spent the next month in virtual isolation. He constantly telephoned Casanova and lawyer David Vogelstein and pleaded with them to get him out. “[Jail] was worse than the hospital,” says Casanova. “It scared the shit out of him. He tried to get hold of me every day. He was afraid he’d never get out. He’d just plead with me and say, ‘Jack, you gotta get me out of here, please, please, man. I’ve been good, I did everything people told me to do. I took off for a little while, I know that was wrong. Please, get me out of here. I’m going crazy, I’m going to kill myself.'”

Except for lawyers Etherington and Banks and five people from the Dallas area, David received no visitors. Graham Nash, Stills, CSN management, his father, and even Casanova stayed away. Until he was released on May 1, David battled with drug withdrawal and incarceration alone.

Philadelphia, July 13, 1985—It is an emotional benediction. Joan Baez, the Mother Teresa of the ’60s counterculture, moves onto the Live Aid stage and dramatically proclaims to the crowd, “Welcome, children of the ’80s, this is your Woodstock.” As she sings “Amazing grace / How sweet the sound . . .” Baez seems to be trying to evoke ghosts of that rain-soaked, three-day conclave. But that’s a long time gone, and Live Aid isn’t “Woodstock II.” Too much has changed in America, in the music industry, and especially in David Crosby to justify such a comparison. In 1969, skinny-dipping hippies were taking LSD and chanting obscenities at Nixon, while at JFK Stadium short-haired preppies were waving the Stars and Stripes. Back then rock raged against the Establishment; today it’s a multibillion-dollar enterprise, a cornerstone of the American mainstream.

CSN has interrupted their troubled cross-country tour to appear at Live Aid. Initially, no one knew if there would even be a tour, since David was still in jail. Worried promoters called Bill Siddons to ask about David’s release, and Siddons could only fend them off with, “The lawyers are working on it.” Attorneys were also rumored to be working for Stills, who, reportedly tired of David’s drug problems, had allegedly filed legal papers to dissolve the group.

Nash remained more of a friend. Once David was released from jail, he spent a few weeks relaxing at Nash’s Hawaii home, returning to his Marin County haunts just before the trio regrouped in L.A. to rehearse for the tour. While CSN publicity people restricted David’s public appearances to create a new drug-free image for him, the old David was in evidence when the tour opened in Sacramento on June 28.

David Barton, a reviewer for the Sacramento Bee, told me David’s eyes were glazed onstage and that he seemed “very detached.” Barton called the show “pathetic.” “His voice was very weak, and he looked pale,” said Barton. “But the most depressing thing of all was David’s only comment to the audience. He told the crowd to hang on to loved ones, because ‘you don’t know how long you’ll have them.’ It was clear he was referring to Christine Hinton.”

Live Aid is a welcome break from the tensions of the tour. Graham Nash and Stephen Stills mingle with old friends in a “hospitality” area and watch other performers on a TV monitor outside their van. They show no ill effects from the early-morning flight and seem to be genuinely enjoying themselves.

Siddons had barred me from seeing Nash a few months earlier in L.A., saying, “It upsets Graham too much to talk about David; I don’t want his time in the studio to be affected.” As I approach Nash and tell him of Siddons’s ban, Siddons walks up and denies it. “I’m a big boy, I can handle myself,” says Nash. He invites me into the van to talk about “losing his friend” David.

“The prison term shocked him,” says Nash. “I think he fears the jaws of the wolf. But I haven’t seen it scare him enough. It’s terrible for me. I rarely see my friend. I don’t have the same rapport with him that I used to have. David likes to get high, he’s a sick man.

“I’m amazed that he’s still alive,” Nash says. “He’ll eventually die—it’s only a question of when. He won’t want to hear that. He’ll read that and despise me for a while. I’ve armored myself, but it’s heartbreaking.”

As Nash speaks, David remains closeted in a backstage van. Newly hired bodyguard “Smokey” Wendell (reporters are told that he’s a road manager) stands watch by the door. Except for CSN management people and an unidentified, tall, foxy-looking Oriental woman, no one gets past Wendell, who in 1980 was hired to keep John Belushi “clean” (at $1,000 a week). The solidly-built Wendell had previously been hired by David’s camp in the early ’80s, yet couldn’t keep drugs away from him, according to Armando Hurley. But now Wendell seems to have matters under control. When reporters ask to interview David, they are brusquely told, “NO way, David’s burned out.”

David stays in the van until CSN is summoned to a holding area directly behind the stage. As he prepares to go on, I can see that his face is covered with makeup. Yet the scars from his staph sores are still visible. Onstage, David Crosby, the counterculture’s “Yosemite Sam,” is barely able to stand upright. He is more evocative of Altamont’s savagery than of “Teach Your Children.” His stringy, thinning hair and bloated stomach are kept from the TV audience. There are closeups of Nash and Stills. But throughout CSN’s three songs, David is ignored.

After the performance, CSN is interviewed by MTV’s Alan Hunter, and here the trio is one happy family, talking about their tour and a still unfinished album that is scheduled to be released next April.

Barely able to keep his eyes open, David tells Hunter, “I’m a happy man, I’m a very happy man. If I was put here on this planet to do anything, it was this [singing]. I’m just happier than I could possibly be, man. Things are looking great. You saw what we do, you saw how well we’re doing, you see my friends are still my loyal friends. I’m just overjoyed to be back doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m a very happy man.”

After the interview, I approach David and ask about his health. He stares vacantly at me for a moment, then coos, “I’m doing great, I’m very happy. I’m back playing and singing.” Before I can ask anything else, he looks at his bodyguards and blurts, “I gotta go inside for a minute” and again disappears into his van. I’m left alone with Casanova. I ask to interview him, and he snaps, “Take your best shot; we’ll take ours later.”

While Casanova speaks ebulliently of the future, David peeks through the blinds of his van. Here he is, at the rock reunion of the ’80s, and he is forced to watch from afar. I wonder why. Are his handlers afraid of something?

Indeed they are. Before a planned CSN reunion with Neil Young, the trio is moved into another van, and it’s then that I learn about the management’s fears. Live Aid staffers are specifically instructed to barricade a side entrance to the van. David’s new quarters are off limits, I am told, to insure that no one passes him any drugs. Similar precautions are outlined in the tour’s insurance policy, including a prohibition against David’s driving. Casanova has also imposed another restriction: Jan Dance, nicknamed “Spot” (as in “See Spot run”), is banned from the tour. She has also been barred from joining him at Live Aid. Casanova believes the middle-aged, sandy-haired woman is a “detriment to David’s life.” She was arrested last year in Kansas City aboard an airplane for possessing a gun and drugs. Casanova blames Dance for David’s drug problems. “She might’ve burned at Salem at one time,” Casanova says.

“The lady is very unhealthy, both physically and mentally,” says Casanova. “David feels guilty about her, because the lady previous to her died, and he felt responsible. He has a big guilt complex. If she was out of his life, I think David would have an 80 percent better chance. She’s living in his house. You can’t get rid of her. She’s got her hooks into him so badly. He knows it, he just can’t do anything about it. She’s not on the tour because of me. That’s one of the guarantees I gave Graham.

“No one can tell him what to do. They can’t say, ‘Well, you can’t bring your old lady . . .’ Because he’ll just say, ‘The hell with you.’ David is stubborn enough that if you push him in the wrong direction, he’ll do that. I told him, ‘I’m not going to threaten you, but it’s a very crucial time to be going on tour with Stills and Nash. This is a turning point.’ He was very broke. So I just said, ‘It’s up to you. But if you want me on the tour, Jan doesn’t go.’

“He was upset. He didn’t want to tell her. He felt guilty; fear enters into it, too. She has an influence over him that’s uncanny. There’s a lot of psychic phenomena that goes on. If David knew I was saying his old lady was into black magic, he’d be very upset.

“David calls her, but every time he talks to her she brings him down, because it’s always ‘I need, I want, you promised . . .’ As soon as she finds him, she’ll call four or five times a day. A lot of times I ward off the call, a lot of times he takes the call. He calls her a couple times a week. Then he starts feeling guilty about what’s going on back there.”

“She’s an outgrowth of his problem,” says David Vogelstein, David’s lawyer. “Anyone who abuses drugs surrounds himself with people who are abusing. She’s not helping him, but if David is abusing drugs, it’s his problem. You can’t blame her.”

I want David to settle this debate, but he remains secluded.

Neil Young appears onstage at Live Aid, and in that raspy, growling, pained voice begins to sing, “The Needle and the Damage Done”:

I sing this song because I love the man

I know that some of you won’t understand

Oh—the damage done

I’ve seen the needle and the damage done

I watched the needle take another man

A little part of it in every man

Gone, gone, the damage done

And every junkie’s like the setting sun.

David finally emerges for the CSN&Y reunion. Flanked by his bodyguards, he moves mechanically ahead, ignoring me and all my questions.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

This article originally appeared in the December 1986 issue of SPIN. 

She’s the Great Pretender. She used her eyes, she used her legs. She used her style, her fingers and her imagination to make you see there’s nobody else like her.

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• Chrissie Hynde Drafts Dave Gahan, Brandon Flowers For Duets LP
• 30 Overlooked 1994 Albums Turning 30
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The turning point in Chrissie Hynde’s life came when she was 14 and she and a few girlfriends went to see Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels at the Chippewa Lake Park Appreciation Day show, to which all the greasers from Northeastern Ohio migrated. She wanted to be the guitar player. He played good and, naturally, if he played good, he looked good. He looked like he was plugged in. Chrissie saw the afternoon show, which ended with a fistfight onstage. She was so knocked out by it that she stayed for the evening show, which also ended with a fistfight onstage, and she realized she had been fooled.

Like every teenager in the 1960s, she wanted to be Brian Jones in the Rolling Stones. She was more inclined to be Brian Jones than to sleep with him. She wasn’t thinking about things like that when she was 14. She didn’t do anything like that until she was 19. She was thinking more about how cool it was to wear white trousers and a white shirt and play harmonica in a really rocking band and look really great and have a rock teardrop guitar. It was real ’60s.

When she was 16, Chrissie and a girlfriend met Ron Wood and Rod Stewart in a hotel room after a Jeff Beck Group concert in Cleveland, and it looked like she and Ron Wood would be spending the night together, except Chrissie, not quite understanding what was going on, insisted on leaving because she had a driver’s training class in the morning.

Back then Chrissie wasn’t thinking, “Gosh, I want to be Jimi Hendrix,” but she related to him strongly and thought he was very, very happening. She still does, especially when she looks at who’s around now.

The Beatles were her all-time favorite. The Stones were really rock ‘n’ roll and gutsy, but there was something about the Beatles that was out of this world. They touched her spirit. When she thinks about the Beatles and the Stones, she’s reminded how so many people fail to see how much they were influenced by The Kinks. All she has to do is listen to something like “Autumn Almanac” and she hears it all in some of Dave Davies’s chops, especially in the Beatles. One of Chrissie’s favorite quotes is Dave Davies’s: “It wasn’t called heavy metal when I invented it.”

Bob Dylan, of course, was real special—she tried to learn to play guitar from one of his early songbooks—and so were the Velvet Underground. There was no one in that band who she identified with; they were a kind of dark band she heard on the underground radio stations who made a noise that appealed to her. King Floyd’s “Groove Me” was very, very hip and really sexy, and she was big on ? and the Mysterians, the Kingsmen and her hero of all time, Iggy Pop, although with Iggy, she came in a little after the fact, not until Raw Power. Chrissie was from Akron, where her dad worked for the telephone company and her mom was a part-time secretary, and Iggy was up in Detroit, back in the early days, when he was with the Stooges.

Chrissie would have traded bodies with Jeff Beck in a second, just to get her hands on a guitar like his. She’d always been a guitar freak. She loved B.B. King when she first heard him on the radio. And, of course, she thought, and still thinks, there should be a statue of James Brown in every park in America. She thinks he had the greatest influence of anyone on contemporary music.

That was back in the days when all the people who had influenced her were happening, before people were gossiped about and put under a microscope. When you never saw the person, there wasn’t very much to read about the person, there wasn’t that much information available. Chrissie’s imagination could run wild. Like, Chrissie is sure Brian Jones never poured his heart out to the press, and if he did, he was probably a twass anyway, trying to get laid. Now, especially with videos, you get to see people too much.

The truth is, Chrissie Hynde couldn’t imagine being in the Detroit Wheels, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, or any band, including the Pretenders. She can’t imagine herself in videos, in history, or as anybody else. She doesn’t even believe she’s herself. When she sees herself in a video, or hears herself on a record, that’s not her. When she looks in the mirror she doesn’t see Chrissie Hynde, doesn’t identify with that body, much less somebody else’s. There isn’t anybody she would want to be, not even for a moment, but there are people she wouldn’t mind smelling for a moment, or being near, or touching, like Patrick Macnee, who played Steed on The Avengers, or Bobo Bolinski—”Believe me, folks, I’m no big deal”—in R. Crumb comic books.

The available information: Chrissie Hynde got her first period when she was 13, on a day she was supposed to go horseback riding. (Before she was into rock ‘n’ roll, Chrissie was into horses.) Her period freaked her out. She had a vague idea what it was, but it embarrassed and pissed her off. She was absolutely sure it was never going to happen to her. In her school they made all the guys go to a study hall, and all the girls went off to watch a film about periods, and Chrissie couldn’t look a guy in the eye for the rest of the day after what she had just seen.

• Chrissie’s bangs were inspired by a picture of Jane Ascher she saw in 16 Magazine when she was 14. Ascher was Paul McCartney‘s big flame for years, before he met Linda. She had ginger, or red, hair, which Chrissie thought was really cool. Greaser girls always dyed their hair red or black.
• Chrissie prefers stockings to pantyhose because she doesn’t like to wear panties. Stockings are better because she can hold them up with a garter belt and can pull off her underpants without undoing the whole thing every time she goes to the bathroom. Pantyhose may be more convenient when she’s wearing her miniskirt, but if she’s wearing a dress all day, stockings are better; but she rarely wears a dress all day. She’s not a dressy girl.
• Before becoming a musician, Chrissie was into painting, but not commercial painting. She didn’t want to use any talent or skill she had for anything other than being creative. She would rather have been a waitress and paint on the weekends. But she didn’t want to be a waitress, either. Then she thought she could make a go of it with music and make money at her hobby.
• Chrissie waitressed at Stouffer’s and worked as a cocktail waitress for a while in Cleveland, when she was 23 or 24, after she went back there in 1975. “I was a lousy waitress because I had to serve meat to people. It really pissed me off. I could never be courteous or polite when I really wanted to take the thing out back and bury it. I never took very well to people hissing at me, either. Also, I was very flaky with bills, getting meals to people on time, and having to talk to them. My heart really wasn’t in it.”

When she was at Kent State, the year they shot those students, she worked at this diner, and she found it humiliating when guys she fancied came in and she was in her waitress garb, with her hair in a hair net, and she had to serve them. She wouldn’t have minded serving them in other capacities.

“Also, I hated it when I worked in this snack shop and had to make banana splits. For some reason I found it humiliating if a guy saw me making an ice cream sundae.” She got fired because this guy kept coming around on his motorcycle and revving his engine and motioning for her to come out, which she usually did.

Sometimes you’ll lose something in one place and find it, much later, in another. These kinds of occurrences happen to Chrissie constantly. In fact, she made a career of them. Like when she was 12, Chrissie’s teacher told everyone in class to write their favorite word on a piece of paper. Then she told them to write a poem about the word. Chrissie’s word was England. The poem she wrote turned out to be a complete outline for everything she did over the next 20 years.

When Chrissie was 21, her folks thought they’d buy her a watch for her birthday, but she really wanted a Melody Maker guitar that was advertised in the paper for $60. So they bought it and she later traded it for a hollow-body Ovation guitar. Soon, she sold the Ovation and split for England and France. Meanwhile, her girlfriend went to the music store where Chrissie traded the Melody Maker and bought it. A few years later, when Chrissie went back to Cleveland and joined a band, she borrowed the Melody Maker from her friend.

Chrissie had a copy of NME, an English music paper, with a picture of Iggy Pop in it, which she framed and hung on her wall. She went to England in 1973, because she was influenced by this picture. She thought everyone there was interested in the kind of music she dug. All she took with her were three albums, Raw Power, Fun House and White Light, White Heat, and about $500. She felt she might need the records for a fix somewhere along the line, but about three months after she got to England, she lent them to some guy and he left the country.

One night, she went to a party, and walked into a room full of strangers, really bummed out because someone had stolen her prize possessions. Some guy in the room said, “What was that?” “Somebody took my Iggy Pop album,” she said. Then a voice said, “Oh, I know Iggy Pop,” which floored her, because she could never find anyone in London who even knew who Iggy was. The voice belonged to the guy who had written the NME article about Iggy. He said he needed a place to stay, and when he came over and saw the pictures she had on her wall he said, “This is the girl for me.” But she didn’t think this was the guy for her. He did, however, get her a job writing at the NME.

Before Chrissie left Ohio, a guy named Duane, who was in a band, called her. He had heard that she wanted to join a band and invited her to audition. But she told him she couldn’t because she was moving to England. After spending a couple of years in England and Paris, where she failed to get a band together, she returned to Ohio in 1975 to rediscover her roots. After all she had gone through to get out of there, the last place she ever wanted to go back to was Ohio. While she was there, she ran into a drummer named Tony Fier, who later became Anton Fier, the drummer in the Golden Palominos. He was working in a record store and thought she was some kind of big shot because she had lived in England and wrote for the NME. He said he had a band and needed a singer. He took her over to another guy’s house he was working with, and it turned out to be Duane.

After Jack Rabbit, the band she and Duane were in, broke up, Chrissie moved to Tucson, Arizona, with a girl named Ann, who had been her mother’s hairdresser. Chrissie didn’t like Tucson because it was really hot, and nobody there had ever heard of Bobby Womack. She was pretty bummed out. She was only there a week and already she was heartbroken. She missed Paris and wished she’d never left. The whole thing seemed like a big mistake, and she didn’t know how she was going to get back or what the hell she was even doing in Tucson. Then, one day, out of the blue, she got a phone call from a guy she’d met in Paris who she didn’t think even knew her. He was getting a band together and wanted her to sing. He sent her a plane ticket. The next day she was back in Paris, in a band called the Frenchies.

In 1976, Chrissie went back to London. She’d had this feeling about London. She knew something was going to break loose there. She tried a few different things with a few different people. She started a band with Mick Jones, a very London-type guy who was a Mott the Hoople fan. They put together a few songs, some of which appeared on the first Clash album. She also tried to do something with Malcolm McLaren. She had worked in Malcolm’s clothes shop in London in 1974. Later, when she was back in Cleveland, he wrote her a letter asking her to front, as a boy, a band he was forming called the Love Boys. He even offered to pay for her plane ticket, but Chrissie declined the offer because she was still in Jack Rabbit. Now that she was back in London, Malcolm came up with another idea for a band called the Masters of the Backside, in which she was just going to play guitar. The drummer was going to be Chris Miller, who became Rat Scabies, the drummer in the Damned. They rehearsed and played a few songs, and everything was looking pretty good, but, like all Chrissie’s previous bands, everyone went off to do something else and she was left behind. She didn’t fit in because she was American and a couple of years older, and they were London kids who were part of the punk explosion.

Some guy Chrissie knew, who had been painting a ceiling for manager Tony Secunda, told Tony about this chick who could sing and play guitar. Tony, who had handled Steeleye Span and Marc Bolan, wanted to break into the punk thing. He’d been an innovative manager in the early ’70s and was now feeling a little bit left out. He may have seen Chrissie as a potential way back in.

“So I went to his office with a guitar and an amp,” says Chrissie, “and started playing the chords for the song that became ‘The Phone Call.'” She just played the chords and looked at the guy and said, “That’s it.” And he said, “Great.” And she said, “Well, that may be great for you, pal, but I’ve got to really get some money together, and I don’t have time to hang out in your office and play for you, and stuff.” She was delighted to see him write out a check for her rent. She thought, if this guy wanted to be her manager, it was OK with her. For six months she went to Tony’s office, and every week he gave her the rent, which was about five pounds, and he gave her 15 pounds a week for nothing, and he’d buy her lunch and sandwiches. She made him take down all his gold records from his previous acts, because she said they looked like bowling trophies. “I sort of punked the place up a little, but I was still unsatisfied ’cause I still didn’t have a band.” Finally, he said she had to put something on tape, because he couldn’t get her a record deal otherwise. So she went into the studio and made “The Phone Call.” John Cale went down to a pub to call so they could get the beep from the phone. Tony took the record to some record companies, and things looked really good. “Then, one day I was talking to Tony on the phone, and he hung up on me, ’cause I said something he didn’t like, and in those days, if someone hung up on me I’d never talk to them again.” And she never did.

What Chrissie isn’t saying is the big role drugs played in this series of coincidences. There are always some drugs going around. Back when Chrissie was at Kent State, there was a guy named Randall, who used to go to England. He was the only guy she ever met who’d gone to England, and the only one she thought was really happening, because he came back with all these hip records, before he came back with a heroin habit. He wore English clothes and was a bit of an Anglophile. Chrissie really didn’t know him, but she sure tried to get in on his scene. She met him again on the street in England, after the falling out with Tony Secunda. He was selling shirts in a stall in the Portobello Market. She started selling shirts for him and he was going to manage her. Then, the day before he was to introduce her to Dave Hill (a key player in the story), Randall and Chrissie had a falling out. But while looking through some notes and stuff, Chrissie came across a letter from Greg Shaw, who had this little record label, Bomp Records. Once, probably because she was so loaded, she had stayed up all night with Greg Shaw and tried to show him how to play “Louie, Louie” on guitar. (That’s when Chrissie realized she wasn’t such a lousy guitar player after all.) Nobody had ever spent that much time trying to help Greg Shaw do anything before, or else he probably wouldn’t have sent Chrissie a letter telling her that if she ever wanted a record deal, to call him and he’d put her in touch with Dave Hill. Today Dave Hill is her manager.

Before the Pretenders, Chrissie knocked around with Lemmy from Motörhead. He told her to get in touch with a drummer named Gas, who lived in Lambert Grove. One day, Chrissie was in a flat in Lambert Grove, looking out the window, when a guy fitting Lemmy’s description of Gas suddenly walked by. Gas turned her on to a bass player from his hometown of Hereford named Pete Farndon. She liked the way Pete held a guitar and didn’t play with a pick. All the other punk bands played with the guitar down toward their knees and with a pick, and Chrissie didn’t think that was the way to play bass. She liked the way Pete played and looked, but Gas used to get so loaded all the time he kept falling off his stool. He also didn’t take criticism very well. Chrissie fired Gas and kept Pete.

“I really wanted to get Phil Taylor from Motörhead to be my drummer,” says Chrissie,” ’cause I thought he was great. I was really into this idea that my band was gonna be like a motorcycle club. I mean, like I was a bit of an asshole, I’m the first to admit, but that’s my vision of it. But Phil was in Motörhead, and I would have never dreamed of asking him to join my band and sabotage another band. But there were rumors that Motörhead was gonna break up. The Heartbreakers were in town, and I knew they’d already asked Phil to join them, so I thought, ‘Fuck that,’ I’ve got to get in there and let him hear how cool we are. Then, at least if Motörhead does break up, maybe he’ll come to me. So I had this idea, right? What we’ll do is tell Phil that we’re gonna audition a guitar player and we need a drummer to do that, and can he come down and just sit in with us. I thought that seemed like a pretty good scheme.”

Pete knew a guitar player in Hereford named Jimmy Honeyman Scott, who was married and had a couple of kids. “We told Jimmy the scheme and had Phil audition him. Jimmy and I didn’t get on so well ’cause he was a speed freak and he thought I was a punk. He wasn’t into punk music. But I was really taken with his guitar playing. I thought, ‘We gotta get Jimmy Scott to come down and help us with the demos we were doing with Dave Hill.’ But Jimmy had no interest in moving to London. He’d been working in a music store, which made him happy, and he had a girlfriend and a flat. But he said OK.” They did about six or seven songs, then Jimmy went back to Hereford and Phil Taylor went back to Motörhead. “But I had to have Jimmy in the band. He was amazing. He was this huge Nick Lowe fan and, of course, I knew Nick Lowe, so me and Pete dropped the tape off with Nick. He was so impressed he said there was a song on there he wanted to get in on. Of course, I knew it was gonna be ‘Stop Your Sobbing,’ cause it was so pop-y, so I was quivering with excitement when I called Jimmy Scott, ’cause I knew all I had to say was Nick Lowe wants to produce a single with us and Jimmy would want to join the band. It was the perfect trick. So I called Jimmy and he said, ‘Before you say anything, I’d really like to join the band.’ ”

Jimmy and Pete knew a drummer from Hereford named Martin Chambers, but they didn’t know where he was. The previous drummer, Jerry, was good, but he was divorced and had three kids in Ireland he had to keep sending money to, so he had to keep doing gigs on the weekend. But Chrissie needed complete commitment. She didn’t want people to even have a girlfriend, let alone alimony. It wasn’t Jerry’s fault, but he just didn’t fit into Chrissie’s plans. One day they bumped into Martin. It turned out that he lived two blocks up the road from the rest of them. They asked him to rehearse with them, and by the time they started playing the first song, “Precious,” they all knew they finally had the band. All they needed was a name.

Chrissie had been talking to a greaser girl the night before. “We were talking about this London Hell’s Angel we knew, and I was saying how he would shut his door and put on this Sam Cooke song, ‘The Great Pretender,’ so the other Hell’s Angels couldn’t hear him, and we were laughing about it. It just happened to be on my mind when Dave Hill called and said, ‘Look, they’re pressing this record now. What about a name?’ And I said, ‘Well, call it the Pretenders.’ ”

Chrissie and Pete had a romantic affair during the first two years of the band, and after that things were never right between them. They still worked together, but they really didn’t even want to see each other. Chrissie didn’t want to hurt him, but she couldn’t help it. He would play too loud and do things to wind her up, and she’d always take the bait. He was also very insecure about his playing. Actually, she didn’t think he was that good a bass player, but he had all the enthusiasm she wanted and he had the attitude.

After the band finished their first world tour, everyone started to crack up. Chrissie was drinking like mad, getting arrested and everything. Pete was shooting smack. It was really tacky. No one even realized he was doing it. No one could believe it. No one could accept it. It couldn’t be really happening. And he denied it. Toward the end of the tour, while they were in Australia, Jimmy took Chrissie aside and said they should start looking for another bass player when they got back. Musically, the band was plummeting. They took three months off, and when they got back together, Chrissie, Martin, and Jimmy decided to let Pete go. Two days later, Chrissie got a phone call from Dave Hill. He said something really strange had just happened. He thought Jimmy was dead.

“I don’t know how Jimmy died. He took something, but I don’t think they ever knew exactly what. I think it was some kind of cocaine cocktail.” He was in very poor health when Chrissie met him, even though he was very young. He was kind of a burned-out speed freak and he never looked very healthy. He was also the funniest man she’d ever met. She was really close to him. But anyone who knew Jimmy at all felt he was their little brother. He called Chrissie mother. “He would breathe life into my songs. I’d have a basic song that wouldn’t turn anybody’s head, and Jimmy would start playing to it, and that’s when it became a Pretenders song.” He told Chrissie not to give her songs away, and he didn’t want credit for writing them. He wasn’t interested in anything to do with punk. He liked the Beach Boys. Yeah, that was his favorite. In fact, that’s what they played at his funeral.

The next and last time Chrissie saw Pete was at Jimmy’s funeral. She knew exactly how Pete felt. He’d been fired because he was taking drugs and then Jimmy goes and tops himself. Pete just thought it was horribly unfair and was really bitter. Chrissie didn’t feel much better. Nonetheless, she and Martin had to carry on. Jimmy was replaced by Robbie McIntosh, who Jimmy, coincidentally, had asked to join the band the night before he died. Robbie is what Chrissie calls a guitar bore. “All he could do was play guitar and listen to old records. He was just like Jimmy Scott in that way.” Chrissie will always have a guitar bore in the band because guitar is the staple of the Pretenders sound. Robbie’s buddy, Malcolm Foster, replaced Pete Farndon on bass. Less than a year after Jimmy’s funeral, Pete was found dead in his bathtub from a drug overdose.

Chrissie was three months pregnant with her first daughter when Jimmy Scott died. Ray Davies of The Kinks was the father. They had been introduced in America by a mutual friend during the Pretenders’ first world tour and lived together for four years. Chrissie had read that she had tracked Ray Davies down, pursued him and hounded him, and ruined his marriage, but it isn’t true. “Sure, I wanted to meet him, but just like anyone who likes his music would want to meet him.” She also met Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Paul McCartney, and Keith Richards. One rumor was that Chrissie and Ray had planned to marry and have a child nine months from the wedding night but that they had a fight on the way to the ceremony and the magistrate refused to marry them. The fact is, Chrissie never believed in marriage. Their child was born nine months later. In any event, Chrissie was never the type to pour out her heart to the press, where she could be put under a microscope. But somewhere along the way, when she met Simple Minds‘ Jim Kerr in Australia or her last world tour, she got hip and suddenly marriage did mean something. They got married in May 1984; 10 months later Chrissie had a second daughter.

Chrissie thinks if you’re a woman and 35 years old and you don’t have kids, that’s unnatural. “Maybe it’s not unusual, but it’s unnatural, on a purely humanistic level. That would feel more odd than me having kids. People get carried away with their own self-indulgence if they’re having sex and they’re not having children; it can only make you go slightly off the rails mentally because it’s just unnatural. You shouldn’t be fucking all the time and not getting pregnant, because that’s not natural, so emotionally everything else is going to get out of balance. But if you have children, that keeps things in perspective and everything’s answered for. In the world we’re living in people fuck for ten years and don’t get pregnant because they’re taking drugs.”

Jim Kerr had been working with producer Jimmy Iovine and told him that Chrissie was going to try a different producer because she felt it was time for a change. Everything else had changed. The minute Jim told him Chrissie was without a producer, Iovine was ringing Chrissie’s doorbell. Chrissie was sitting with her baby. There was nothing rock ‘n’ roll about her at all. She had almost forgotten that she’d ever been in a rock ‘n’ roll band. But Jimmy made her remember. She couldn’t imagine what he saw in her at all. Chrissie can be really humble and pretty crazy on the side. Jim called her every day and said, “I’ve just gotten off the plane, have you written anything?” Chrissie said, “Why should I write anything?” “Because that’s what you do!” he said. “When you’re filling in your passport and it says occupation, you put songwriter.” He called every day and reminded her of what she did and who she was.

So Chrissie wrote the songs on her new Get Close album, and Martin, Robbie, Malcolm and she recorded it. It was a good album, but not great. The day after they thought they had finished the album, she brought in some new musicians and walked out with Robbie, bassist T.M. Stevens and Blair Cunningham, this year’s Pretenders.

Sometimes what you find, you never lost at all. Chrissie is full of contradictions. The closer you get, the further away she seems. Don’t get her wrong. Beneath that tough black leather jacket is a born-again hippie at heart. Her music sounds carnivorous, but she’s strictly vegetarian. For all her cockiness, she is a simple human female, from humble beginnings, trying by hook or by crook to somehow keep the world from toppling. She comes on like gangbusters, but believe her folks, she’s no big deal.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

This article originally appeared in the January 1986 issue of SPIN. 

Ion Tiriac, tennis’ Transylvanian terror, who claims to be related to Count Dracula, is Boris Becker‘s manager. Immediately following the 17-year-old West German’s historic Wimbledon victory, Ion was heard to tell Becker, “Your life is over. You are born again with me.” In his spare time, Ion, whom Ilie Nastase calls a “tough guy,” eats shards of glass. Asked what kind of circumstances could provoke such dramatic displays, he says, “You use toothpaste? Toothpaste made from powder, powder made from sand, glass made from sand.”

Yes, Ion, but what about your digestive tract?

“You don’t digest, just eliminate.”

It’s mid-September, and Tiriac’s been stuck in Oklahoma for three days for the so-called Tulsa Challenge tennis exhibition. The matches, boasting Becker and Kevin Curren, this year’s Wimbledon finalists, and Guillermo Vilas and Vitas Gerulaitis, haven’t been able to muster more than a third of the 9,000 fans it takes to till the downtown convention center.

Ion’s losing money in this pasture, and the morning-drive DJ on KELI is saying Becker’s 144-mph serve would “whip the peewine and puddin'” out of his game. Ion’s committed to stay, but he’s spending most of his time working the phones, making deals, setting up more lucrative stops for Becker—keeping the faith in the wilderness until they can get back to the big towns and the big deals.

I had been inextricably locked in a chess game with Tiriac which began after Becker won the Wimbledon men’s singles title in July. My efforts at getting an interview amounted to a conundrum of mailgrams, hand-carried and Federal Expressed packages, and a torrent of phone calls and messages ad ridiculum. By September, though, it had become clear to Tiriac that I was as determined to get an interview as he was not to grant me one. We compromised. Ion made it difficult—to test me. I grew older.

The phone rings in my Tulsa hotel room. It is the surly, gruff monotone of the man who kept me at arm’s length during the U.S. Open. There is no “Hello” or “Wie gehts,” just “Tiriac.”

“Boris will not be able to talk to you tonight. He’ll be having something to eat, then he’s going to bed. Eleven o’clock tomorrow morning, O.K.?” End of terse message. Words are time and time is money.

The master of subterfuge calls me back. He’s changed his mind. Boris’s itinerary for the next day is tight. Quickly my allotted time evaporates as Tiriac recites: “9:30 Tulsa Tribune, 11:30 NBC local news, 11:45 KELI radio, 12:00-2:00 press lunch, 3:00-4:00 practice, 4:00-5:00 tennis clinic, 7:00-11:00 the games.”

There’s a knock at the door. Guillermo Vilas, who’s also holed-up in the downtown Westin Hotel, strolls in, suavely clad in off-duty Ellesse and Puma. “I have Ion on the phone,” I tell him. “I’ll be a minute.” Recently embroiled in a tempest over accusations he took appearance money, Vilas has been working aggressively on his own resurgence.

“Don’t let Ion give you a hard time,” he says, tossing back a disheveled head full of ringlets.

A striking contrast to his mentor/business partner, Tiriac, Vilas off-court is a charming philosopher, poet, and musician, who makes the thought of sharing Juanito’s Tulsa burritos and a few Carta Blancas seem agreeable. Vilas, who has known the enigmatic Count for 15 years, says, “Ion’s putting you off because he’s concerned that once you get Boris started he might ramble, and you’ll print everything he says.”

As we walk out toward the elevator, Vilas offers to answer any of my questions, “But talk to your boyfriend first.” Namely Becker. Wiseguy.

In the mid-’70s, Ion Tiriac’s will of steel helped shape Vilas into the giant-slayer who won 50 straight matches and 15 titles in 1977 and became the No. 1 player in the world. They extended their collaboration to the ownership of five tennis clubs and “the Becker acquisition”—Vilas put up half of the $250,000 Tiriac paid Becker to sign the West German athlete nearly two years ago. The 46-year-old Tiriac, who says he’s “too old” to coach, then enlisted Germany’s national trainer, Günther Bosch, to continue polishing Becker’s game, while the Rumanian Count juggles exhibitions, tournament appearances, endorsement deals, and the gypsy life like an armful of rackets.

Tiriac’s undeterred vision is welded to Becker’s image and game. Perhaps that’s his genius—single-mindedness. The coveted perks of stardom that Becker might enjoy—the cocktail parties, celebrity bashes, and jet-set scenes—must be cast off for higher goals. And if Becker’s memory lapses, Tiriac’s doesn’t. During Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, Boris had tickets to see Bruce Springsteen, but was “encouraged” by Tiriac to relinquish them each time as he advanced in the tournaments. “If Ion was another guy who just wanted the kid to be happy, he’d have said, ‘Yes, go to the concert, you’re young, you should do it,'” says Vilas. “But when you do things like win Wimbledon it’s not by luck. You can win one tournament maybe, but not Wimbledon.”

The morning after my arrival in Tulsa, Boris Becker, all 6’2″, 180 pounds of confident, yet angelic golden boy, is sprawled on a sofa in the hotel lobby. I’m reminded of what John McEnroe said after he first met him: “He seems so much bigger than you think.” Dressed in tennis casuals he’ll probably outgrow before his next birthday, Becker greets me for the first time since the U.S. Open, when his lightning serve froze the official Omega digital clock before he was unstrung by Joakim Nystrom in the fourth round. That night, in Flushing Meadow, New York, just prior to the match, Boris, reputed for his exquisite control of his game and his emotions, paced in the men’s locker room, looking uncharacteristically nervous. During the match he spat a litany of angry rantings in German at his Puma racket after every unforced error. Even umpire Mike Lugg caught hell from Becker. “One more mistake like that and you’re out!” Becker warned him. The press reported that a downtrodden Becker had, for the first time, acted his age.

Now it’s weeks later, and this morning Becker’s sunny and fresh-faced, sitting with the pleasant, understated Bosch, who brought Becker to Tiriac’s and Vilas’s attention, but seldom draws it to himself. Before we can begin the interview, Tiriac, hunching, stone-faced, walks up and says, “Be careful with a magazine like that, O.K.?”

“Careful of what?” I challenge.

He ignores me and says again to Boris, “O.K.?”

Then Tiriac, who when looking at you seems to have eerie peripheral vision, says, “Well, your magazine more,”—he hesitates, apologizing for his English—”more liberal than Rolling Stone.”

“You mean progressive,” I offer.

“Whatever,” he says brusquely. “You have one hour. You can get out of him even what his mother fed him when he was six months old.”

I remind Tiriac I was granted three hours, and as he quickly shuffles away, I note that scoring popularity points with outsiders doesn’t interest him; the only points that turn his head are those his players earn to enhance their standing. Bosch, who speaks no English, quietly walks off behind him.

Becker says he is closer to “Güntzie” and Tiriac than he is to his own father. On the Tonight show, he had said he felt like he had “three daddies.” He now tells me that if there’s any resentment felt by anyone around him, it’s by his father. He endearingly mimics 50-year-old Karl-Heinz Becker: “I’m your real father, not them.”

It’s apparent early into our conversation that Becker wrestles with more than a few of the attendant distractions and complications of being a superhero. For one thing, he can no longer live in West Germany, where all national broadcasting was preempted to televise his Wimbledon and U.S. Open matches to 20 million viewers. Lufthansa, the national airline, announced his scores to passengers in-flight.

“I cannot walk on the streets, it doesn’t matter if it’s Munich, Hamburg, or Leimen [his hometown],” says Becker. “If I go out, I wear disguises in Germany. I’m living in the world now, and it’s hard sometimes for my parents to understand what’s going on. I’m 10 months on tour, and they see me like two months. In the beginning they say, ‘O.K., for sure,’ but they didn’t realize it was the reality. It’s still tough on them, but slowly, slowly they get used to it. It’s not too bad in the U.S., but it’s getting worse here every week.”

When he does go home, the enfant célèbre is conspicuous by his Blues Brothers punk shades, and the company he reportedly keeps, which includes German TV personalities, Princess Stephanie of Monaco, and, more recently, attractive pro-tennis player Susan Mascarin.

A day doesn’t go by in Germany when Becker isn’t in the dailies. “Boris says anything,” claims Associated Press journalist Nesha Starcevic, “and it gets a headline.” Sweetheart though he remains to a majority of his countrymen, a small backlash has stirred up against Becker. Recently, a West German postal worker, annoyed by the Becker brouhaha, started an anti-Boris fan club that plans to give out T-shirts with “Who the hell is Boris Becker?” across the front. In less than a month, 148 members joined. Says the club’s founder, Juergen Pfaffe, “All this monkey business about this girlfriend here and that princess there, that’s enough!”

It’s a late Tuesday afternoon and downtown Tulsa is oddly tranquil. A softening sun silhouettes Becker who, seated and relaxed, conveys quiet composure and tangible magnetism. Ilie Nastase had told me: “He’s the most mature 17-year-old I ever met.”

“I was on the phone two days ago with an old school friend,” says Becker. “He was talking to me like a hero, like an idol. I tried to be like it was two years ago . . .” His voice trails off. “It’s hard for them—they don’t know how to treat me anymore.”

“Does that sadden you?”

“. . . life goes on,” says Becker matter-of-factly.

So, too, his Concorde pace. “I’ve not many close friends because I’m one week here, one week different place. Acquaintances, yes, but not close friends.”

The lonely hotel hours—between matches, during rain delays—the stress, and the press are made bearable for Becker by his constant companions, Walkman, American Top 40, and MTV. (He’s got a particular penchant for video animation, such as Dire Straits’ “cartoons.”) Tiriac had listed the increasing encroachments on his client’s time: “In addition to 40 weeks on tour this year, we now have more responsibilities to the game and the media. It’s getting out of hand, the over-publicity he has, particularly in Germany. It’s becoming ridiculous.” Becker has even gotten offers to do a couple of movies, one of them about Renée Richards, the transsexual tennis player. But Becker and Tiriac are aiming for the long-term volley that a career sidetrack could impede. “Maybe when I’m 30,” says Becker.

The intense publicity may have gotten in Boris’ way during the U.S. Open. The draw produced the likelihood of a McEnroe-Becker face-off in the quarterfinals, and as the tournament progressed and both players kept winning, the pressure and anticipation built. Before the outcome of the fourth round, CBS, assuming the champs would meet, preempted its programming for the night of the anticipated match to televise it nationally.

“In the players’ lounge everybody was talking about it,” says Becker. “Other players and guys in the locker room who didn’t like McEnroe kept saying, ‘You’re going to beat him.’ And maybe in the back of my mind I was thinking about playing McEnroe during the Nystrom match.”

But it wasn’t to be. “I did everything possible I could during the match. I was fighting, I was diving. I tried everything, and it just didn’t work.” Instead, Becker lost his Ellesse shirt to the cool Swede Nystrom. “After the match,” he says, “I went back to my hotel room and I got so pissed off I lost, I was doing sit-ups and exercises for an hour or more.”

During a press conference at the U.S. Open Becker had expressed eagerness to play McEnroe. Now he tells me, “Hopefully, I’m not playing him in the next 10 years, but I think I have to.”

“You mean you’re not looking forward to it?”

“Of course, a little bit, because he’s the best player. I could learn a lot from him, but he’s, at the moment, a little bit too good, maybe.”

But Tiriac concedes nothing in answering questions about Becker’s readiness to face McEnroe in a tournament. “Which McEnroe?” growls the riddle master. “The McEnroe who played in the Masters, the McEnroe who played in the U.S. Open, the McEnroe who played Wimbledon? Boris has a good chance to beat him. McEnroe, for one reason or another, up and down.”

(But in two recent exhibitions, Becker played the McEnroe who has dominated tennis since the retirement of Bjorn Borg, and lost both. “You don’t become No. 1 by winning one tournament,” said McEnroe.)

There’s a growing concern, though not on Becker’s part, that if he continues to throw himself around the court like a rag doll, he might sustain injuries that could set back his game (and the solid gold Ebel watch he wears on court) more than a few hours. But he’s oblivious to words like ‘fear’ and ‘pressure.’ Or so he says.

“To be No. 1 in tennis you have to be not normal. I’m not normal in my physical, in my head, in everything.”

In the nearly two years that the triumvirate of Becker, Tiriac, and Bosch have collaborated, Becker has reached the ’84 Australian Open quarterfinals and the ’84 Italian Open semifinals. In 1985, he has won Queen’s Club, Wimbledon, and the Association of Tennis Professionals Championship, and made the 1985 U.S. Clay Court and Tokyo Seiko semis, and the Davis Cup finals. He’s also won a number of exhibition titles. Between prize money, BASF, Puma, and Ellesse endorsements, personal appearances, exhibition money, and other marketing strategies brainstormed by Tiriac, one report pegged Becker’s 1985 earnings at $3 million. “It’s ridiculously low,” says Tiriac.

There is a formula to the brain trust’s success. It is contained in “the program,” a plan for the development of the consummate tennis property to which Becker, Tiriac, and Bosch have dedicated themselves unconditionally. While the tennis prodigy says he is not materially motivated, months before his 18th birthday, Tiriac bought his protégé a Monte Carlo address. By maintaining a six-months-a-year residence in Monaco, Becker reportedly only pays 19% of his earnings in tax compared to the considerably feistier 56% income tax he would otherwise pay in West Germany.

As long as he calls Monaco home, Becker may also elude Germany’s mandatory draft (an 18-month obligation). Translated: he may not have to trade his Puma Pro-line for a Deutschland rifle. Tiriac’s (and Vilas’s) retirement fund would also remain unscathed.

Tiriac seems defensive about Monte Carlo: “I am based there. The German Federation didn’t want to have any economic part in his development, and I had to do it myself. It’s also easier to do it from here than from Leimen.”

Boris is oblivious to, and perhaps uninterested in, his manager’s Machiavellian master plan, but he is intimate with the rigors of his daily regimen. “With Ion it’s black and white. When I’m practicing, it’s nothing else, just practice. If I don’t want to practice, then I should take some time off. But when I’m ready again, I’m practicing six hours a day.

Though he says he trusts Tiriac’s professional instincts totally, that wasn’t always the case. The first time Tiriac suggested Boris’s footwork on his serve was all wrong, Becker countered, “What the hell are you talking about? I have a very good serve.” Tiriac, who claims you have to prove everything to the skeptical athlete, drew illustrations of how, with different foot positioning, Becker could move forward faster. Becker’s own experimentation with the new plan finally convinced him that Tiriac was right.

Echoes Ion: “I think we have a lot of respect for each other. That’s the way we are probably going to survive.”

“I’m not an easy player to coach,” Becker admits, “’cause I don’t like when somebody’s always talking to me: ‘You have to do this, you have to do that.’ If I’m missing a ball 10 times, I need some help and I ask Günther what I’m doing wrong, but he knows how to back off.”

“The program” has caused some conflicts with Elvira Becker, who disagrees with her son on the subject of deferring Boris’s education. Becker has two and a half more years to go to take his abitur (the mandatory West German university entrance exam), but Boris, who’s already fluent in English, says, “If I really need it to know more about life to succeed, then I’d do it.”

Clearly, when Tiriac recently said, “Tennis is 80% head, 20% legs,” he wasn’t considering enrolling Boris in night classes at Heidelberg University.

I ask Becker how he psyches himself for competition. Verbal sparring with Tiriac helps, he says, but he often pumps himself up for a match by “thinking about Sylvester Stallone.”

“As Rocky or Rambo?”

“Both, but more Rocky when he’s practicing on the beach,” Becker says.

With those who say Becker may have won Wimbledon too easily, the usually patient Vilas is impatient. “Look, I think philosophy’s very interesting and history is very nice,” he says. “Napoleon lost Waterloo ’cause somebody forgot to say to part of the army ‘Attack,’ whatever. You can write history afterwards, but some people are part of it. Easily or not, he definitely won Wimbledon, and in 10 years that’s what will count. You have to say the kid is good.”

Unlike the three years of hard work and nurturing Vilas required with Tiriac, Becker’s transition to the major leagues was fast. Two years ago when he turned pro, Becker’s ATP ranking was 529. But under Tiriac, who has coached or managed not only Becker, but also Vilas, Nastase, Adriano Panatta, Manuel Orantes, and Henri Leconte, Becker’s game rapidly developed. Tiriac ranks his newest pupil at the top of that distinguished class in drive, raw talent, charisma, and, maybe, eccentricity. “From the beginning,” Tiriac had told me in one of our phone conversations, “Boris and I had a deal that he’s not jumping over the board when he wins.”

“Ion is there to make sure the kid doesn’t get strange and crazy and lose it,” says Vilas. But somehow an image of Boris popping bottles of German Sekt champagne doesn’t quite compute.

“At the end of ’84 when I won the Australian Open quarterfinals,” says Becker, “I was a bit shaky. I couldn’t feel the ground anymore. But then I lost a couple of times,” and he was reminded how fragile triumph-induced euphoria can be. It’s that same volatility that Becker says excites him about the game. All the champs lost the U.S. Open this year: Martina, McEnroe, Chrissie, Becker.

“There are three different Grand Slam winners now. That’s why I like tennis so much. One day everything can change.” He should know.

There’s not much normal about a kid whose architect father helped build the only tennis courts in Leimen, on which Boris played before reaching the age of reason; a kid who a year later (aged 8) would play the game competitively, and by 14 decide to give up high school and its social life to make a lifetime commitment to tension-strung gut and lint-wrapped rubber balls; who says he learns something from every match he loses; who’s almost abnormally uninterested in the lucrativeness of being ranked fifth in the world and what that can buy—except that it means being able “to replace one or two Walkmans a week because,” as Tiriac says, “he’s losing them all the time and can’t live without music.”

“Maybe I’ll have a different opinion three or four years on the tour,” says Becker emphatically, “but, at the moment, I’m not playing tennis for the money, as long as I don’t want to buy a house, a plane, or a ship.” But he qualifies that judgment. “Maybe the security you have from so much money is nice.”

In Europe, where checkbook journalism is rampant, Becker was paid $35,000 by a German magazine for an interview. He claims such proceeds have at times gone to charities for the disabled. And although he fails to mention it, he added $63,000 to the $12,750 the auction of his winning Wimbledon racket raised for mentally handicapped children.

He says his ultimate fantasy is “having a relationship with my children not like father and son—like friends. I always wanted to be proud of my father, but after Wimbledon I wasn’t anymore, because I needed some help and I don’t have so many friends. I thought my parents were very good friends, but they made some mistakes.

“After Wimbledon my father was giving press conferences and magazine interviews, and I said, ‘Hey, man, you are my father, not my tennis coach. You can talk to me about electronics, or you can say when I have to go to bed—but not that you’re talking to some journalist saying, ‘He’s playing good forehand.’ That’s not his job. We had a long discussion, and he found out I’m right. Now everything’s OK . . . In some ways, I already have more life experience than my father, and he’s 50.”

Becker’s been called “warrior” and even “bully” when it comes to his increasingly assertive court behavior, but now he concedes: “Two years ago I was pretty bad-mannered on the court; throwing the racket, screaming, and worse. But then Ion, Güntzie, and me, we talked about this problem and we found out that when I’m losing my temper, for the next five points I’m not playing good tennis.”

Becker maintains his Teutonic, clear-thinking pragmatism as our conversation moves into a discussion about off-court habits that have gotten in the way of more than one pro’s game.

“People who are taking drugs need sometimes to be happy. I don’t need drugs or alcohol to make me happy. But if anyone asks me [to try drugs], and Ion is going to know, they won’t be happy again anymore.” His voice is facetiously threatening.

“Would he use physical force?”

“Yah, maybe . . . he’s stronger than I am.”

“How do you know?”

“We’ve had some fights,” he chuckles, as I realize Becker, who in the early days was “afraid” of Tiriac, has developed an unmistakable camaraderie with his mentor. It’s also clear Rocky and the Rumanian Rambo have whiled away some of their off-hours in horseplay.

“So, he’s stronger?”

“Until now, maybe,” Becker explains, “but I’m getting stronger, he’s getting older.”

Even heroes have heroes, and I wonder who are some of Becker’s.

He pauses—longer than any question has yet prompted him to—and appears to be more interested in continuing the interview than in leaving for the night’s matches which have already begun.

“The Pope,” Becker says thoughtfully, claiming he may be granted a private audience with John Paul II this year. Although he admits he’s not a churchgoer, he says, “I want to see, I want to touch him. He inspires me. He seems like something else, not a normal human being.” But of the Vatican he says, “Everything is too rich there.”

That night at the Tulsa tennis “shootout” there’s something superhuman about Becker as he blitzes aces past Kevin Curren with the kind of ammo that has the corporate types in the box seats ducking when their teeth aren’t chattering. Even CBS’s Brent Musberger observed, “Coming against Becker’s power is like taking on a Dwight Gooden fastball.” He attacks every ball, because every ball counts.

And Golden Boy’s got chutzpah, too. Since Wimbledon he’s progressively displayed more of it. During this last match in Tulsa (unofficially billed as “Wimbledon II”), he questions a lineswoman’s call. He walks up to the grey-haired official and, with his arm wrapped around her, sticks his face in hers and asks, “Are you sure?” He also wins the match.

Jimmy Connors once said, “There’s no view like the view from the top,” and while Becker still has more dues to pay before he gains admission to that club, his performances seem to say, “It won’t be long now.”

In the meantime, January’s Nabisco Grand Prix Masters in New York—and the challenge of the top 16 singles players pitted against each other for a $500,000 purse—awaits the phenom.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

A version of this article originally appeared in the September 1985 issue of SPIN. In honor of the announcement of Pat Benatar‘s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, we’re republishing it here.

Ballsy! Gutsy! Bitchy! One hard-rockin’ mama, right? The little girl with the big-big mouth. The girl who invented black tights and short-shorts. The wet dream of every honest, hard-working, beer-guzzling, God-fearing, red-blooded, normal white male this side of the Rio Grande River, huh, folks. Gimme a break, assholes. Let’s start at scratch and work our way back. Pat Benatar began her career as a singing waitress in the NYC comedy club Catch a Rising Star. She was conveniently discovered by the proprietor, who went on to become her manager, just like in the movies. Only I never go to those kind of movies. And I never won six Grammys, didn’t have six consecutive platinum records, or sell 20 million copies of anything. Thank God, I never made one rock video. Pat Benatar has made 13, and we’re still counting. She’s beginning her first tour in three years, has a new LP, 7 The Hard Way, and has finally “proved” herself, winning more freedom than ever just to be… herself.

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• Dave Grohl Jams with Lionel Richie, Dr. Dre Inducts Eminem, and More Moments from Rock Hall Induction
• The Story Behind Our 1985 Pat Benatar Cover

Popularity Is So Boring

I wake up and say, “I’m Pat Benatar, so what!” The great thing about doing this—and they hate when I say this—is that I can shut it off. I don’t have to be it all the time, only when I wanna be it. That’s good, because if I wanna go home and look fucking horrible or I wanna be fat or a pig or give my dog a bath … whatever I wanna do. I can do it and I don’t have to feel guilty about it. I don’t give a shit. I don’t care. All I have to do—when I go onstage for 2 1/2 hours—is do my job and do it good. When I make records I do the best I can. [I’m waiting for the worst. . .] That’s my obligation. My stage persona is just one tiny part of the whole me. Sometimes—I know this sounds ridiculous, but—I like being “normal.” I mean, not normal like they are. . . but it’s what I miss most. [Who doesn’t?] As you go on, you look at this image you’ve created that’s gonna plague you the rest of your life. It’s so absurd, because you keep moving and can’t relate to it anymore, to what they envision you as. You keep growing and moving, and you’re stuck with your black tights [wrapped firmly around your neck]. It’s awful. [If ignorance is bliss, we died and went to heaven, but isn’t, so didn’t.]

Assumption Is the Root of All Ignorance

To me, the worst thing you could do with your life is be bored. There’s so much opportunity, you’d have to be a shithead. Then there’s these nouveau visionaries. [They’re never bored, just boring.] I hate them. [Any names, sweets?] The people who always think they know where everything is going all the time. Of course, people are going to assume—they’re probably assuming right now—that we’d be mud wrestling each other three minutes after we’d met. But when we take to the ropes … any and all challengers! [Pat!] You have to be fearless and ready at all times. Anyway … I don’t know … I was never afraid of rapists. If I bit them, they’d die. Blood everywhere.

What Does Pat Wear to Bed?

I hate clothes. I don’t shop anywhere that’s trendy or anything. I think the minute you put something on, it says too much. I’d spend everything on shoes. [No, she doesn’t wear them to bed. I asked.] I’d rather wear the same thing every day. Right now I wear clothes because it’s against the law to run around naked. [Go for it, Pat.]

Aren’t You Ever Afraid of Having Your Clothes Ripped Off on Stage?

No! I’m afraid of the real violence on stage. We have a lot of bomb threats and gun threats from the audience. We get that a lot, and being a woman, you’ve got the anatomy that invites trouble, so it’s pretty scary. They get so crazed, they leap on stage and grab you. I don’t think they’re trying to hurt you, but they’re strangers no matter how much they think they’re your best friend. And it just doesn’t feel good to have strangers all over you, touching you. [Maybe not to you, Pat.]

Life in the Movies

I wanna wait ’til I can play something more than a glamorous face. Something with a little more body. Someone in struggle, conflict, because that’s what’s most interesting to me. I think I’ll have to wait a little while. You have to be able to throw yourself into it as much as you do with music, and I’m not ready for that yet. I’m too selfish. I don’t have enough time as it is. I gotta wait ’til making records slows down a bit. I wouldn’t wanna do it halfway. [For the record, Pat was in “Union City”, which featured another Chrysalis recording artist, Debbie Harry.]

Please! Don’t Feed Your MTV!

Sometimes you become the vehicle for someone else’s genius or lack thereof. It’s such a ridiculous thing, because so much money is spent on video, and when the time comes . . . if you hate it, tough. [You bought it, you eat it.] I think it’s criminal for the artists to have to pay for the video if they want complete control [I do it all the time, Pat], because the record companies are the ones that profit from it anyway. [So why do it, other than to sell more records?] For those that like that kind of thing, I think it’s great. [I think it’s sinful to fill up people’s empty lives with stupid wastes of time, but that’s what it’s all about: filling the void they create so they can love you for being everything they are not.] You’re making it for the rest of America, and the rest of America likes them. [Because the rest of America loves wasting its time on all things boring and stupid and prefabricated, and what better way than video?] I love middle America … those old women, they’re so rich. They know from cooking and cleaning and raising kids, and I love them … they’re so real.

The Baby

I could not have done this at 20, because I was such an asshole—not that I’m not an asshole now, but you have to be ready for kids, because you have to give up everything, every selfish part of you. And in return … unconditional love. [You wish.] That’s what I want. It’s such a pure love. But just wait ’til she’s 15 and I’ll have to start slapping her around.

Hypnotism

I would be frightened. But I would like to learn about the process. I think it would be interesting to find out how we got to this place and what we did before this life, if anything. I wonder whether I have a young or old soul.

The Life/Death Situation

I can see so much more than I could 10 years ago. In this life there isn’t enough time to find out all I’d like to know. There is never enough time. I think the saddest thing is that it is over so fast. I think I hate dying most because this life is over, not because I’m scared to die. I hate the separation of death, being separated from the people you love. The thought of it makes me sick. I’m real attached to people and things. I spent most of my life being closed in and selfish, and now that it’s not like that, I have a lot more room for other people. Growing up, I was never close, but I was never not close, to my family. I spent most of my time wanting to get out, to leave. Then, the first time I went to NYC [from Long Island] in the late ’60s, as a teenager in Central Park I saw all those stoned-out hippies and all the bag people. Everyone was so filthy. I swore I’d never go back; of course I did. All I ever did was spend the whole time irritating my father by saying, “So what if I married a black man if I loved him?” Instead I married an Italian, but what the hell … it’s a short swim….

I would rather spend my life failing and learning than just staying there and thinking it was good. I’d rather make every mistake in the book. It’s amazing to me, this lifestyle. It makes me laugh. Every day there’s a new joke. [There’s one born every minute.] I don’t wanna sound naive, but when I first started out, I didn’t know it would take off like this. I had no idea. I just wanted to make records and perform and stuff. But all the shit that goes along with it … it’s all so meaningless. I mean, how much money do you need? [Well, Pat, a small loan of a quarter of a mil would be fine for starters.]

Rewards

Sometimes I get rewards that I deserve, but I think I have a few more times to go. I don’t think I’ve got it all, but it’s getting better.

Success

We thought it’d be over after the first record, so we’re real happy to still be here. It gets progressively more difficult—not the singing or the songwriting, but take “Invincible” [the new single]. I know I’ll get murdered for saying this, but that’s a song I would’ve done five years ago. After doing Tropico [the last LP], I didn’t really wanna do that type of song anymore. But you have this other thing inside you that says, “Don’t be a schmuck. It’s a good song, what are ya, a jerk? It’s not absolutely going against your principles or anything. [Neither is skinning a cat.] So just do it.” But then I listen to the rest of the record (7 The Hard Way), and it’s like Frankenstein. It just doesn’t fit. They have nothing to do with each other. But it’s good because the less I continue to do that, the more I begin to think that next time I won’t.

Tropico was my favorite record. I won’t ever do records like I used to do ’em. From now on they will all be my favorite. Once you get to that point, there’s no reason to go back. Sometimes you’re a shithead, and it takes a while to get there, but when you do you just go, “Fuck you, that’s it.” My least favorite songs are always the singles. But I feel you just gotta give ’em [the record company] two songs, and on the other eight you can do whatever you want. They were upset with Tropico because there was only one real rocker, and besides, it only sold 1 1/2 million records, and that’s not enough. You gotta sell 5 million each time. When you’re making the record, and everyone loves it, you’re not thinking about that until they’re getting on you when it’s over and it’s not doing what they want it to… and they start going, “Well, what about Madonna?” and you go “Well, what about her? I taught her how to fucking wear tights, man. Please let her do it for a while.” I’m so happy someone else is doing it. Let her have a good time. Now maybe they won’t look at the color of my panties, and they can concentrate on my singing. I mean, it made me so mad because one day I was at the record company and one guy turned to me and said, “You don’t really think they come to hear you sing, do you?” I mean, how insulting … [Face it, Pat, 15,000 boners at a crack and I wouldn’t be complainin’.]

If You Could…

I would love to have one more time to try it all over again, to erase and start over, to start another band. [You’re not dead yet, honey.] But you get into this cycle, this trap, even if you know better. It’s so hard to get out of it. You’re addicted to the things that happen when you’re in the top five. It’s stupid, but you can’t help it once that happens. And you also have this entourage of people whose lives become dependent on how many records you sell, on your creativity. That’s why I disappear when I’m done with it. I have no use for it. I mean, they’re all nice guys, but what do you do with ’em? [First, Pat, I tie their hands behind their backs and blindfold ’em.] You start feeling like Kleenex. It’s a strange existence. Nothing like what I thought. Then I look at the baby and think, “What the fuck does she think?” Ah, but she doesn’t give a shit. She’ll grow up and say, “My mother used to be Pat Benatar.”

Now, to add injury to the insult of my reputation from associating with a story as preposterous as Lydia Lunch interviewing Pat Benatar, I am doubly insulted that some people have the nerve to complain that perhaps there wasn’t enough vindictiveness, viciousness, assaultiveness, insultingness, accusation, or downright physical abuse in this article. I mean, I do have my reputation to live up to. In spite of this, I refuse flatly, sharply, point-blankedly to comment further about all of the things, yes indeed, that I do hate, that you would so love to hear me rant about—like rock music, women in rock music, new women in rock music, the problems of being a woman in rock. And other stultifyingly boring subjects.

In spite of your prying insistence and morbid curiosity concerning all the occasions—every event, every single minute, daytime, nighttime, lifetime—that led up to this one small occasion, I must staunchly say here and now that I refuse to let you in on one single, small, or fetid detail. They say that what you don’t know can’t hurt you, so let me now leave out who bathes in the blood of others, shovels shit, or has her nipples pierced. You need know nothing about which miss has a penchant for pushing wheelchairs in front of speeding automobiles, who best likes sticking firecrackers up a cat’s asshole, or which of us has the slightly retarded brother. You won’t get it out of me which of us danced topless, bottomless, and perhaps, yes, with a male partner in some sleazy dive on 42nd Street in the struggle on the way to the top. You leave me no choice but to delete some of my favorite anecdotes concerning the more intimate and—shall we say—deviant sexual practices of either of us. You’ll hear nothing, not one grisly recounting of hitchhiking repeatedly around Manhattan or standing topless under the Triboro Bridge. In short, there are no sad, embittered, and tortured tales concerning anyone’s incestuous relationship with all or any of the family tree. For that, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for My Father’s Daughter, my autobiography to be out next summer. Until then, I’m afraid we’ll just stop this side of truth, beauty, and filth, because that, after all, isn’t that what we all want?

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

This article originally appeared in the May 1989 issue of SPIN.

I do a talk show called “TALK-BACK with Bob Larson,” syndicated in nearly 200 markets.

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Not just any talk show. A religious talk show that presents the Christian perspective on topics ranging from sex to suicide, racism to rock ‘n’ roll.

I’m a Christian. The born-again kind. That means I believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God, who died for our sins and rose again from the dead to give us the gift of eternal life.

They play in a heavy metal rock band.

Not just any metal band. A black/thrash/speed metal band with lyrics describing sex with corpses and songs offering prayers of praise to Satan.

Which presumably means they are Satanists. Why else would Slayer sing, “Warriors from the gates of hell/In Lord Satan we trust” (“Show No Mercy”)?

Am I genuine about Jesus? In my teens, I was a professional rock ‘n’ roll musician. In my early 20s, I became a Christian. Now, Christ is my Lord, and I look forward to spending eternity with Him in heaven.

Are they serious about Satan? Does Slayer look forward to partying with the Evil One in the infernal inferno? To find out, I went to West Germany, where Slayer was in the midst of its World Sacrifice Tour. Slayer on tour in the land of Bach and Beethoven. Bob Larson close behind. The ultimate irony.

A few weeks earlier, a Pan Am plane left Frankfurt and blew up. I landed safely in Frankfurt, but the next night in a Hamburg concert hall, things exploded. Excuse the pun—all hell broke loose.

If Slayer was going to play for the devil, they picked a poor place to do it. The hall was cavernous and cold. No heat. You’d think with Lucifer around, the place would’ve been a little hot, but no. It was freezing. Backstage, Slayer shivered, hunkered down like four lost sheep far from home. Onstage, they became fire-breathing demons of rock ‘n’ roll.

To chants of “Slayer, Slayer,” the band came on-stage, appropriately dressed in black. Guitarist Kerry King wore a leather shin guard with steel studs in the form of an upside-down cross. Guitarist Jeff Hanneman wore a T-shirt saying, “Slaytanic Wermacht” (war machine). Vocalist Tom Araya’s T-shirt declared, “Sex, Murder, Art.”

They had the look of studied evil. They must have practiced for hours in front of a mirror to effect their snarls of contempt for decency. Minutes earlier, they were belching beer and tossing around a small rubber football. Now, in the midst of the fog machines and the thunderous roar of 3,000 fans, they were the embodiment of evil.

“Gutten Nacht,” Araya called out, attempting a little German. The fans roared with approval. He could have spoken French for all they cared. They weren’t there for small talk. They wanted to hear the songs of Satan sung syllable-for-syllable, note-for-note, just like on their records. They lip-synced the words, even though the majority had no idea what they were saying. Just the obvious devilish catch phrases. They all said “f***ing” on cue, but did they know they were singing about doing it to a corpse? Did it matter?

Every comment was canned. Night after night, the same song intros. Little spots of masking tape on the floor showed everyone where to stand to catch the right rigging light at the proper moment. Nothing was spontaneous. Even Araya’s eyelid, which arched slightly when he said “Satan,” appeared to be choreographed. Every note of every riff, every scowl, the same.

No one in the band was nervous. They had been through this a zillion times before. “Is this how Anton LaVey of the Church of Satan feels after celebrating his umpteenth black mass?” I wondered. The lighting man played his big board like a virtuoso pianist. Now the blue light goes on Araya. Next, Hanneman is stepping to the foot of the stage at the spot marked “X.” Hit the red floor spot shining upward under his chin so it creates eerie shadows, as he glowers menacingly. (Remember when you did this as a kid, putting a flashlight under your chin while you told scary stories in the dark?)

The audience scowled back. Except when I took their pictures. Then, they smiled. No one heard me say cheese, but the sight of a camera caught them off guard and for a brief moment they forget where they were. The tension in their facial muscles relaxed. After the flash went off, something clicked and their eyes narrowed again. Their lips curled in contempt of propriety, and they returned to their devilish demeanor.

Behind Slayer, the stage backdrop featured their stylized pentagram logo, centered above drummer Dave Lombardo. On either side of the Satanic symbol were two six-foot stained glass windows superimposed with a cross—upside down, naturally. The deafening roar of 120 decibels (112 is the pain threshold, like standing next to a jet taking off) launched the baddest boys in rock ‘n’ roll into “Spill the Blood” (“Spill your blood, let it run onto me/Take my hand and let go of your life . . . /You’ve spilt the blood/I have your soul.”).

I groaned. “It isn’t going to take long to find the devil around here,” I thought with self-righteous smugness.

I already knew a lot about heavy metal, but actually seeing a “Satanic” band in action confounded my previously comfortable conclusions. I had thought it was an open-and-shut case. Bands like Slayer, who use occult symbols and sing of Satanic ceremonies, were the devil’s doing. Like a fundamentalist Sherlock Holmes, I set forth to unmask the deceiver. But where was Lucifer?

How fitting that the madness of metal mania would strike West Germany, a country that once boasted Europe’s richest cultural heritage. Before the parents of Slayer fans were born, Nazi madness unleashed an insane onslaught of evil that knew no reasonable bounds. Demagogic rallies and sterile architecture served to promote the Aryan ideal. Mass psychology triumphed over reason. Was black metal breeding the same insensitivity to logic? Were symbols of evil (the pentagram instead of the swastika this time) once again inciting legions of the discontented to overthrow an existing order?

Fifty years ago, Germans goose-stepped in exacting regimentation, stiff-armed salutes sanctifying der Fuhrer. In Hamburg, German metal maniacs thrust Satanic salutes (pinkie and index finger extended) upward and slam-danced to the fastest rhythms in rock. They knew every word, even if they weren’t sure of the meaning. Their favorite song was “Angel of Death,” about Joseph Mengele, the butcher of Auschwitz (“Sadist surgeon of demise/Sadist of the noblest blood . . ./Monarch to the Kingdom of the Dead”). The song is a horror genre account of Mengele’s machinations. The crowd reacted violently. Were they incensed that their elders allowed him license? Did they secretly long for the glory-gory days of the Third Reich? Probably neither.

The whole scene was so emotionally two-dimensional, it didn’t inspire the brain to think past the surface flash.

Where was Lucifer? Satan could be in the crowd, a beer-buzzed, wasted bunch that the band referred to backstage as “German vermin.” Their metal regalia was an open invitation to evil. Everywhere, there were thousands of jean jackets, backs emblazoned with demonic deceptions . . . horned goat baphomet symbols of Satan . . . gruesome images of devils . . . more upside-down crosses than a denizen of demons could concoct in a month. A strange one with sexual overtones depicted a naked woman lying on her back, legs spread apart at the junction of the inverted crucifix cross-members. Black magic pentagrams declared, “Welcome to Hell.” Was Lucifer lurking there? Nah. Too obvious.

Perhaps I’d find him in the pit, that five-foot-wide section between the stage and the steel restraining bars that hold back crazed crowds. The pit is the Promised Land every true headbanger longs for. How does he cross over Jordan to get there?

It starts in the back of the crowd. A kid leaps into the air and somehow lands on top of the audience. Heads, shoulders and outstretched hands support him. Excelsior! Onward to the pit! Gradually, he makes his way forward, pushing or being pushed. He crawls on his back and stomach, surging with the intensity of Jerry Rice heading for a touchdown.

One last lunge. Head over heels, he somersaults the last few feet until he lands head-first, or hopefully feet-first, beyond the barrier—in the pit. Then, he is ungraciously escorted, to put it nicely, by security to the side of the auditorium and sent to the back of the crowd. Why do they do it? It’s macho. It’s fun. It’s what you do at metal concerts. Does anyone ever get hurt? Sometimes, but like players in an NFL title game, headbanging pit-divers quickly get back on the field and do it again. Satan may live in the Pit, but not this one.

Perhaps the devil could be cornered during some secret ceremony of conjuration after the show on the tour bus . . . glorified Winnebagos hosting a rolling revelry on wheels. I’d heard all about groupie orgies and drug-drenched bacchanalia. Slayer’s bus was a bland bus, although a luxurious one. Two TVs. Two VCRs. A supply of videos, mostly horror flicks. A john (number one only, please). A microwave to cook the after-concert catered meals. A center lounge (where a lot of drinking and beer-belching goes on). And in the back, bunks. Six of them. Claustrophobics like me, beware! Satan wouldn’t want my top cubicle.

Where were all the porn videos? After all, this was a Satanic rock ‘n’ roll tour. The worst corruption I could find was one slightly used Playboy magazine they looked at again and again. It stayed on the couch in the center of the bus. Every time a band member sat down, he picked it up, thumbed through it, and laid it back down. The same breasts, the same pubic hair, the same silly poses. Either she was dynamite or these guys were really bored.

Probably the latter.

“I thought I’d freeze my butt off before we went onstage.”

“My drum solo just didn’t make it tonight. Something wasn’t right.”

“How many hours until we get to the hotel?”

“So, Paul, what was the gate tonight?”

“Hey, Jeff, you’re into war stuff. I saw this store with some really nice German winter military jackets.”

“Ice, where’s the ice? They’re supposed to bring it on board the bus every night after the show. You just can’t get ice in Europe.”

Idle conversation. Kerry kept counting the days. “Just 19 days left,” he said to me. “When I saw Paul, our tour manager, as I got off the plane in Frankfurt to start the tour, I said, ‘Paul, 30 days left … 30 days left until it’s over, and I can go home.'”

None of them wanted to be here. It was a job, nothing more. No colored condoms backstage in the rider for these guys’ contract. They weren’t interested in groupies, although there aren’t that many girls at a black metal concert. The ones that do attend look slightly used and very diseased.

No one seemed to mind my presence. I was part of their job, too. So what if I was looking over their shoulder? They were getting a feature story, and that’s all they cared about. Backstage before the concerts, we talked about God. That’s when they seemed the most conversational. But after the show, on the bus, they wanted to be left alone.

I felt they weren’t doing anything different because I was there. They didn’t have to snicker behind my back to tell dirty jokes because nobody laughed much. This wasn’t sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. This was boredom and business.

“I want to watch ‘Gremlins’ tonight.”

“Ah, come on. You’ve seen that six times already.”

“My voice is hoarse. I didn’t towel down fast enough when I got offstage.”

“Probably that smelly T-shirt you’ve been wearing for the last five nights onstage. Why don’t you change it?”

“Hey, driver, can we stop at the next gas station? I need some postcards to send my girl back home.”

The only time Slayer spends on the bus is from midnight to 6 a.m., en route to the next city. No room and no opportunity to sacrifice young virgins on bloody altars or hold seances to conjure the living dead. With nine people aboard, it’s too crowded. Besides, the autobahns are too bumpy. If Slayer truly worshipped the devil, it seems Lucifer could at least provide a Learjet to conjure demons eight miles high.

I did get one brief glimpse of the cloven-hooved Deceiver on the bus. Every night during the long drive, the VCR ran constantly—Bruce Lee, Clint Eastwood, Chuck Norris and assorted horror videocassettes. (If you’re looking for film classics, try HBO, not the Slayer bus.) Satan reared his horned head halfway between Donaueschingen and Fuerth. The boys were yukking it up at “Return of the Living Dead” when a nubile actress stripped in a graveyard and lay naked on a tombstone, inviting all kinds of atrocious overtures. But like the occult overtones of a Slayer concert, it was only make-believe.

Was Lucifer living in the lives of the boys of the band? I wasted no time getting to the big “S” question.

“Are the members of Slayer Satanist?”

The four answers I got (in order) from guitarist Kerry King, fellow axeman Jeff Hanneman, drummer Dave Lombardo and bassist/lead vocalist Tom Araya were:

“No.”

“What’s a Satanist anyway?”

“That stuff scares me.”

“I won’t say.”

I had expected a hostile reception from America’s symbols of metal Satanism. In fact, they didn’t know that much about why I was there. They had been given a direction to cooperate with me and that was that. Even black metal bands have to take orders from a higher authority: if not the devil, then their manager and their record company.

“Sorry I disappointed you and left my white polyester suit and red tie at home,” I joked. “Every Christian leader has one,” I said to the drummer. “It goes with the image.”

He looked at me blankly. I realized he didn’t know I was kidding. “We really didn’t know what to expect,” he responded.

In a way, they looked forward to my companionship. Their fans aren’t terribly bright, and they get sick of talking to each other. A new body on the bus is a change of pace.

Kerry King was the first to open up to me. But he didn’t want to talk about God or the devil. “I’ve got a home back in Phoenix,” he said. “Rob Halford of Judas Priest lives down the road. First place of my own I’ve ever had. We’re not a rich band. We keep putting money back into producing the show. Me, I drive a Toyota 4X4.”

Kerry, by his own admission, writes some pretty “sick” lyrics. (Case in point, “Necrophiliac”: “I feel the urge, the growing need/To f*** this sinful corpse/My task’s complete the bitch’s soul/ Lies raped in demonic lust.”) But Kerry says he’d rather spend his time at home in Phoenix with his four dogs and dozens of snakes. He breeds the slimy critters professionally. Reticulate python babies fetch $1,000 each, he gleefully informs me. Kerry claims he’s never read the Bible, though he says if he did he’d probably write some Iron Maiden-type lyrics from Revelation. He looked once at The Satanic Bible, but found it boring and trashed it. He seemed to know little about Christianity, but his eyes flashed indignantly at the mention of Jim and Tammy. The PTL scandal inspired the tune “Read Between the Lies” (“Evangelist, you claim God speaks through you/Your restless mouth full of lies gains popularity/You care not for the old that suffer/ When empty pockets cry from hunger”). Televangelism scandals aside, Kerry says horror movies are his main source of song inspiration.

Jeff seemed the most uncomfortable with the big “S” question. He ascribes to a kind of benign agnosticism. He bristled at the mere mention of any assumed involvement with the Prince of Darkness. Jeff isn’t even sure what a Satanist does or believes. To him, the whole thing is ridiculous. He says all religion is “stupid.” And what of his lyrics like, “Lucifer takes my dark soul/Down to the fiery pits of hell,” from “Necrophiliac”? Watching him onstage gives me a clue. He looks evil. His eyes flash with an aggressive, almost demonic intensity. He’s the headbanger cheerleader, exhorting the crowd to ever more expressive states of frenzy. He admits that something, somewhere in his childhood, angered him. “The stage is my opportunity to release that unresolved aggression,” he freely acknowledges.

Dave is the kid next door you’d want your daughter to marry if he weren’t already happily hooked to Teresa, his wife of two years. (Jeff and Araya are still available. Kerry is in the process of unhitching from a brief marriage he admits was a mistake.) Drummer Dave isn’t comfortable with the band’s Satanic overtones. “Look,” he says, “I didn’t write those lyrics. And I wasn’t in favor of using an upside-down cross as a stage backdrop. I just want to be the best metal drummer in the business.” Ironically, he’s the only one with an occult background of sorts. His Catholic, Cuban-born family dabbled in the Caribbean cult of Santeria. Dave remembers his mother making offerings to obscure deities. Somehow, he retained his reverence for God, probably because of a Catholic school upbringing.

Araya is a mystery. Born in Chile, he came to the US at five years of age. His face persistently glows with mischievous malevolence. He won’t say whether he’s a current or past Satanist. His eyes twinkle at the question, as though he’s hiding some dark secret of the soul or cleverly milking the mystique. He’s an incurable pessimist. “The world is going to end in disaster soon,” he says seriously. “I feel it wherever I go.”

Ironically, while Araya evokes the essence of evil onstage by singing lines like “Praise Satan,” his private life has been closely touched by evangelical ideology. His girlfriend’s parents are devout Christians, and both his parents are born-again, ordained, charismatic lay preachers. “My mother prays for me every night,” he admits with sincerity bred of Latin familial respect.

The day before I left America to join Slayer on tour, I asked my talk show audience what they most wanted me to ask the boys in the band. For two hours, our lines rang with the same inquiry stated over and over: “Do they care if their fans become Satanists because of their influence?”

One caller, David from Ontario, Canada, was a self-professed Satanist. He sacrificed animals and burned demonic images on his arm with a propane torch. “I’m 17 now,” he said, “but if the devil gives me what I want until I’m 19, then I’ll murder for him. I’ll kill anybody Satan wants me to.”

David admitted, “I got into Satanism because of Slayer. It was their lyrics that turned me on. But if they’re not really Satanists, I’m going to quit listening to their music.”

Did Slayer take responsibility for David’s deeds? I asked them that question backstage in Nuremburg. Remember what that city is famous for? Passing the buck. Adolf Eichman’s excuse—”I was only following orders.”

“It’s the parents’ responsibility to be aware of what their child is listening to,” Araya argued. Kerry added, “Every album we’ve put out always has a sticker about objectionable language.” Lombardo lamented: “I don’t care about all these things. I play drums. That’s it.”

Does evil exist? If so, where does it come from? Not a casual question to be asked in the land that fostered the gas ovens of Buchenwald.

According to Tom Araya, “Evil could be anything . . . someone that does wrong to someone who’s very defenseless.”

Like a neglected, impressionable 15-year-old with poor self-esteem, worshipping a rock ‘n’ roll idol, who tells him, “Learn the sacred words of praise, Hail Satan” (“Altar of Sacrifice”)?

“We’re not neglecting the child. That comes from his parents. We’re giving him what he likes . . . music. If a child is going to be vulnerable, it’s because nobody is paying attention and saying, ‘We love you.'”

Araya admits he would write lyrics about anything except love. “We did a remake of ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,’ and I changed the words ‘I love you’ to ‘I want you,’ meant in a sexual fashion. I don’t feel comfortable writing about love.”

Slayer is not a band of hope. You can’t dance to its music, and I don’t think you’d want to live by it. They’re convinced the world is headed for an apocalypse soon. “Eat, drink and be merry. That’s what I’m doing,” says Kerry King.

I wanted to know if altruism and sacrifice fit into their scheme of human existence. Mother Teresa, medical missionaries, help for the homeless. That sort of thing.

“I matter to myself,” King commented. “I don’t get in anybody else’s face if they don’t get into mine first.”

One thing seemed more sinister than Satanic slogans—the pampered indulgence of the rock lifestyle. Slayer isn’t into the megabucks yet. Tours come in several sizes, tour manager Paul Spriggs pointed out: small, medium, large and extra large. Bon Jovi is the giant size. Slayer is medium. But even Slayer’s fair-to-middlin’ status ain’t bad. When they arrive each afternoon at the concert hall for sound checks, delectable goodies are laid out individually in the dressing room. Candies, munchies, fruit and lots of booze. In fact, beer is there all day long, everywhere. Before going onstage, they receive a delivery from the nearest McDonald’s. If the devil dwells in cholesterol, these guys have a daily, supernatural french-fry high. After the show, it’s a three-course dinner on real china.

I remember John Lennon commenting during his house-husband phase that the hardest thing to cope with after the Beatles’ breakup was learning to fend for himself. Now I know what he meant. No member of Slayer on tour ever hails a taxi, arranges for a wake-up call, orders food from a menu, solicits a drink, pays a bill, tunes a guitar, unpacks a road case or makes any serious decision. Takin’ care of business is always someone else’s job. The result is abject boredom and volitional atrophy. If idle hands are the devil’s workshop, Slayer’s palms are sweaty with evil.

If Slayer is Satanic, the devil sure has his act down to a science. I never knew occult enchantment could be so choreographed. The fans think Slayer’s act onstage is spontaneous combustion, a spark of wicked enthusiasm setting off a firestorm of malevolence. I know better. Every night in every city, the stances and leers were the same. Taped marks on the floor showed them where to stand during each song to maximize “instinctive” showmanship. Each gesture planned in advance, at the right spot, in the right song, on the right beat. If Slayer in concert is one of Satan’s schemes, you’d think Lucifer could at least turn the boys loose once in a while for some unrehearsed debauchery.

Eventually, I found him—you know, de debil. Not in dark occult ceremonies or mysterious lyrics devoted to Lord Satan. And certainly not in the minds of the band members. If you were the devil, would you do the obvious? Of course not. As the King of Deception, his ulterior intent has to be hidden in greed and avarice. I suspect the forbidden brew that Slayer has sipped isn’t the drink of lyrical death and despair. It’s the elixir of fame, the lure of going platinum. In the Garden of Rock ‘n’ Roll, they ate the apple of image over ingenuity, flash over substance, and hype over integrity.

I remember one fan in Bonn, who proudly showed me his T-shirt. He threw open his jacket so I could see the pentagram on the front. It said,”Satan’s Army.”

That’s what these fans think they are. Some elite division of soul slayers, trampling underfoot the heritage of the Fatherland, “Uber Alles Evil!” They buy into the band’s image and hold Slayer hostage to an idea Araya and Co. dreamed up seven years ago to get out of their garage and into the LA metal concert scene. Privately, the band members admit it’s kind of dumb now and has run its course. But if they change direction, that kid in Satan’s Army is going to cry “foul” and the gig is up. So they keep pasting the same sneers on their faces night after night, looking for ever more gruesome subject matter to pan off on the ignorant. Slayer doesn’t serve Satan. They bow before some juvenile delinquent in Bonn who won’t buy their next record if they aren’t evil enough.

“The love of money is the root of all evil,” the Bible says in I Timothy 6:10. Lucifer lurks in Slayer, all right. Not in the stage props and lyrics less graphic than the persona of Freddy Krueger. Black Sabbath said it well albums ago: “We sold our souls for rock ‘n’ roll.” Slayer’s greatest sin is selling out. They, not their fans, are the victims. These are four generally nice guys and reasonably good musicians.

If the soul of Slayer belongs to Satan, it’s not because of bloody rituals in the dark of night. Their root of evil is rock ‘n’ roll stardom. Their pact of iniquity is with the Billboard charts and T-shirt sales. It’s only my opinion, but they have the makings of a really great band. They’ve got the talent, stage presence and moxie to make it. My prayer (I mean that literally) is that both their eternal and artistic souls will be saved. The spiritual will require an act of God’s grace. The musical will need a miracle.

Shakespeare said, “Parting is such sweet sorrow.” Not really. But it was more moving than I anticipated. The last night of the tour, I packed my camera and clipboard and started to walk out the dressing room door. Like Lot leaving Sodom, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to look back. I was leaving behind a lot that I didn’t like. The sweet smell of hash wafting through the bus late at night. The name of the Lord I love profanely expressed. The F-verb, incessantly substituted as an adjective to compensate for lack of linguistic ingenuity.

But there were some things I liked. The camaraderie of guys who were mostly unpretentious in the midst of rock stardom. The honesty of the music, in spite of its lyrical excesses. I even respected Slayer’s paradoxical work ethic in the midst of rock ‘n’ roll insanity. I turned back to say goodbye. No, I didn’t turn to salt, but for a brief moment my throat did turn to a lump.

“Tell the people we believe in the music, and we believe in the kids,” Araya offered in parting. I believed him. The essence of Slayer is in the symbiotic relationship with their fans. Unlike most rock bands who insulate themselves with the perks of rock ‘n’ roll fame, Slayer mingles with their fans. They take time for autographs, photos and small talk. They want German vermin to know they care about their devotion.

But do small acts of mercy redeem wayward souls?

I’m reminded of a 15-year-old named Shae I met several months ago. “I hate your God, Jesus Christ,” he said. “Satan is my Lord. I sacrifice animals for him. My god is Slayer. It’s the words of their music I believe in.” On his right arm, Shae had painted in blood-red the name Slayer. On his left, he etched the words, “Evil Has No Boundaries,” the title to a Slayer song.

Sure, Shae was screwed up already. Yes, he felt rejected and unloved. O.K., so he was looking for reasons to rebel and embrace nihilism. Slayer isn’t all at fault. But they were there when Shae needed an excuse to embrace Hate rather than Love. Today, Shae is a Christian, thanks to some compassionate friends. They reached out with uncritical acceptance.

What if Araya and the others care about the kids? What’s an hour onstage worth to a teenager, who has been spurned his whole life? Don’t the messages of an upside-down cross and the atmosphere of evil say much more? Extremism in the defense of authenticity is no virtue. I’m glad Slayer isn’t as bad as their hype purports them to be. But in Germany, land of shameful memories, where Nazi self-interest briefly triumphed, even Hitler made the trains run on time.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

Twenty degrees and ice everywhere you look and Joan Jett is sitting on the steps of her tour bus parked outside the stage entrance of the Palace Theater in Albany, New York; the bus door’s wide open. “Okay, you guys,” the road manager’s saying. “Joanie’ll talk to everybody, but you gotta get in line, right?” A hundred farm-fed faces in leather jackets, long-haired girls and longer-haired boys, huddled into a queue, and they wait. It’s Tuesday night, and the only other action in this town is the tractor trailers careening down I-90. Twelve, 12:30, and the kids keep up their vigil while Joan signs notebooks, records, headbands, ticket stubs. She’s sharp, compact, and she looks you in the eye like she’s known you since eighth grade.

“Joan, I’m in a band, and we’re trying to rock ‘n’ roll, but it’s hard.” This is a girl about 16, who stood in front of Jett all through her show and shouted along to every word of every song the Blackhearts played.

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“Yeah, I know it’s hard.” Joan says in her gravel rasp that lets you know just how hard. “But the most important thing is to keep playing. Even if ya gotta play for nothin’, or almost nothin’.”

“That’s what you did?”

“Yeah. Plenty of times. Ya gotta keep playin’. ‘Cause then, you can get a following. And once you get a following, you can get more gigs, and get a bigger following.

“And then,” she smiles, her mouth sneaking up at the corners like a leprechaun-gone-wrong, “once you get a following, nobody can take that away from you. You can do anything.”

Do you believe in rock ‘n’ roll? Do you believe in the magic that’ll thrill your soul? Do you still wanna die before you get old?

“I never got over seeing Jailhouse Rock,” is one of the first things Kenny Laguna, who’s managed Joan for the last eight years with his wife Meryl, tells me. “Whoa! And then there was Chuck Berry! And then there was this whole thing. And it became more important to me than politics, more important to me than anything else in this society. Rock ‘n’ roll. It meant something. It changed my life. It changed a lotta things.”

Kenny’s at the wheel of a rented Lincoln Continental, Meryl’s up front, and me and Joan and seven-year-old Carianne Laguna are scrunching together in the back seat; like mom and dad and the kids in the ‘burbs, and this is the way it is for Joan a lot of the time, ’cause she lives with Kenny and Meryl and Cari in Rockville Center, Long Island, when she’s not on the road. But we are not on the way to the shopping center, we are going to the Gavin Report seminars at the Westin Hotel in San Francisco, a big schmoozarama of AOR and Top 40 radio and record promotion people.

“It’s not a Joan thing to go and do this kind of promotion.” Kenny talks fast, and constantly. He started in the business when he was 15, playing keyboards, and writing songs for Tommy James and the Shondells; now he’s nearly 40. “In a way this is weird, ’cause you got all these artists on display, y’know: ‘Here you guys—touch your artists! You’ve played the records, now touch the flesh!’ But we do this thing on a one-to-one basis constantly with the radio stations when we tour. We live and die by radio. Or we did. Now, with the movie, I think they’re gonna give her more respect. Ya see, we’re a very mainstream population in America now; a lotta rock ‘n’ roll ethics are out the window.”

Rock ‘n’ roll ethics?

“Yeah, there was a time when a rock ‘n’ roll band wouldn’t even be on TV if they were a real rock band. Like Led Zeppelin 10 years ago. And if an act endorsed a product, that act was, like, over! I still believe an act’s not a rock ‘n’ roll act after they do commercials. The kids like you for your music, not your taste in Wheaties, right?”

“We get a lotta offers to do that kind of stuff … endorsements,” Joan says. “And I just can’t … it doesn’t feel right. And when I hear other bands taking their music and making commercials out of it, it just ruins that music for me forever. I get sick inside.”

“Why do they do commercials, Joan?” asks Carianne.

“’Cause they make money from it, Cari.”

We pull up in the driveway of the hotel, which is swarming with industry types: lizard boots and satin jackets; T-shirts and Rolexes.

“It all makes you wonder,” Kenny sighs. “Is this what Elvis fought for?”

Most peple remember Joan Jett from her first group, the Runaways, an all-girl rock band that Joan formed under the aegis of impresario Kim Fowley when Joan was around 15. The Runaways scared the shit out of mainstream America: five teenage girls singing loud, fast, and hard about anger, sex, and lust. Of course they were huge in Japan.

Back home was another story. The Runaways were a sensation. A novelty. People showed up at Runaways gigs to ogle, to gape. Fowley’s hype-machine didn’t help. “We were being presented as a tits-and-ass band, and we didn’t realize it,” says Joan.

But Joan was dead serious. A journalist writing about the Runaways called her the “dark soul of the band”; the Keith Richards. One night Rush watched them play from the wings of the stage; Joan saw them laughing. “The assholes! They’re assholes, and I don’t care if you print that!”

After three albums and one sort-of-hit single, “Cherry Bomb,” the Runaways broke up. “I think a lot of what happened was the realization that people weren’t gonna accept us. We were starting to see these articles people were writing about us, and you could feel the hatred. It was so deep. I can sort of understand how people feel when they’re prejudiced against, whether it’s black people or Hispanic people. I know what it’s like, people thinking you’re no good, not as good as them just because you’re a girl.”

“We were trying to be equal on all sorts of levels, and we were equal, but it made people uptight. They wanted to know why girls were playing rock ‘n’ roll, and do you think that the fact that you got female skin makes the strings sound different? Different than what!? I mean, I’m tellin’ you, people were really askin’ us these questions. Like: ‘Do you feel like a man or a woman on stage?’”

Things fell apart. The lead singer, Cherie Currie, left the band after touring Japan. The lead guitarist and drummer wanted to go heavy metal, and Joan wanted to stay rock ‘n’ roll. Joan was finally the one to say, “I quit.” “If I didn’t quit they were gonna fire me, and I couldn’t deal with getting fired from a band that I started. It was crushing.”

She stayed in Hollywood, living on her song royalties in a little place across the street from the Whisky A Go-Go. She was 18, she was depressed, and she was drunk a lot. “I felt like everybody in L.A. whenever I was walkin’ around the street was sayin’ ‘Ha ha Joan Jett! The Runaways finally broke up.’ I felt like those people who hated us were really having a laugh. I was in very good shape at all, in any sense of the word.”

Kenny remembers she walked into the room with a baseball cap on, ripped-up T-shirt and jeans, and looked pretty screwed up. Overweight. Like she’d been drinking. But he thought she was beautiful. She was different from other teenagers, and he decided he’d like to work with her. So he told the guy who was managing Joan at the time, Toby Mamis, that yes, he’d write some songs and try to produce her.

“I was 28 or 29. A little bit old fashioned, not a lot, but a little. So it freaked em out when I asked her in the studio if we could have somebody overdub a little guitar, and she looked at me like … like I’d have to beat up a woman to do that. I mean, I woulda asked any singer-songwriter, let somebody else come in, lay down the guitar tracks in the studio. But she got so nuts when I suggested it. Said: ‘What! I can’t play guitar on my own fucking record! Fuck you!’ And I thought, what a lot of nerve. If I walk outta her, you’re screwed up. Where else are you gonna go right now, this is your best shot, why the attitude? But she just said: ‘I’m not making records like that. ‘I’m gonna play on the basic tracks, or there ain’t gonna be a record.’

“Well, I was really impressed by that. I never met a girl like this before. I said, ‘Joan, I’m gonna help you get a record deal.’”

“When I rebel,” Joan says, “I don’t really take it out on anybody, I just rebel. And I’m the only one who gets miserable. That’s the big difference between me and Patti Rasnick [the character Joan plays in the movie Light of Day]. Patti takes everything out on everybody. I like to think I’m a nicer person than that.

“The other thing that was really different is that Patti would play almost any kind of music just to stay on stage, like she went from being in the Barbusters to being in a heavy metal band. I understand that, but I could never do that. I play my three chord rock ‘n’ roll or I don’t go on stage. Patti, I don’t think it’s fame that she wants, ’cause she says at one point when she’s in the metal band, ‘Look at these guys, they’re dreamin’, they think they’re gonna be stars. I just go out for the beat.’ Well I can relate to that feeling of wanting to be in music for reasons besides becoming a rich star. I’m not in this for the money, but I’m not gonna say I’m not in this to be famous. You wanna be known.

“I mean, it’s nice to have money. It’s nice to get what you want when you want it. I dunno … I get a lot happier lookin’ in people’s eyes, seein’ ’em think ‘Ohmigod she’s lookin’ at me!’ A million people have money, but how many have what I have with the audience? What I have, you can’t buy with money. Yeah, it sounds corny. But that’s the way I feel.”
Kenny and Joan made a single with Steve Jones and Paul Cook from the Sex Pistols in England in 1979, then they cut some more tracks in London at the Who‘s studio; they got the time on spec ’cause Kenny was doing some work for the Who organization. The single got out in Europe, and got on some U.S. radio stations via the import underground. Even so, when Kenny—who by now was Joan Jett’s manager/producer/father/best friend—shopped the album for a U.S. deal, he got rejected by 23 labels. It was Meryl who raised $5,000 to finance the printing and pressing of Bad Reputation on their own label, Blackheart. She got the money by emptying out Carianne’s college fund.

Joan put an ad in the music classifieds: Joan Jett looking for three good men to play guitar, bass, and drums. No showoffs please!, and put together the Blackhearts. She lost some weight and Meryl helped her out with her clothes and makeup. The Blackhearts hit the road. Scuzzy tours in Holland. Dives in the industrial Northeast. Opening act for half the rock attractions in the Western world. Cheap Trick. ZZ Top. The Ramones. The Scorpions. There was no strategy, only the notion that it was better to keep rolling than to stand still. So they rolled.

“We had, Meryl and Cari and Joan and me, almost like what a rock ‘n’ roll band has, you know, that thing,” says Kenny. “That’s how we survived. You know, you live together, you share, and that gives you strength. It felt like the same kind of thing as when I was in rock bands in the sixties, and you’d like all live in the same house.

“It’s lucky we had this bond, ’cause we wouldn’t have gotten through those years. You can picture Carianne growing up on the road, it was wild. But if we had to play a scuzzy bar in Orlando, Carianne would get to see Disney World.”

They finally got the Bad Reputation album out in the U.S., on Neil Bogart’s Casablanca label—Bogart was an old buddy of Kenny’s. But Casablanca was a disco, not a rock ‘n’ roll label, and Joan’s record “fell in the toilet.” So Kenny went back in the studio, and they made another album, I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll. Paydirt. The record went multiplatinum, and the title cut was No. 1 on the charts for eight weeks in the summer of 1982.

“I’m really glad I didn’t have immediate success,” she says. “Like the first thing I did didn’t go No. 1. I think that would’ve been too tough. This way, we established a base, and that’s really important. If everything went really horrible, I’d still be okay. I could still work. I know we got fans all over the country and all over the world, and we could tour on that for the rest of my life.”

This is the life: it’s Friday, and she’s in San Francisco. Upstairs, she’s got a room with a view, candles on the night table, clothes (mostly black) stuffed into a Halliburton that looks like it fell off the back of a few trucks. Downstairs, she’s got the Breakfast Buffet, with a complimentary pot of coffee. “This is a pretty nice hotel,” she says, like someone who knows hotels.

“She takes after her father,” says Meryl, passing the coffee. “She’s got that work ethic. Her father started out in the mailroom of an insurance company and now he’s the vice president. She’s got the same focus.”

Joan considers this a minute. “Yeah? You really think so? I guess both my parents were always telling me I could do anything I wanted. Go for your dreams. I remember when I told them I was gonna be in the Runaways, and I had to go to Hollywood every day to rehearse, and they were worried, but they never forbid me to do it. I think they felt they owed it to me, ’cause that’s the way they brought me up. I was lucky. Having your parents’ blessing is so important. Maybe not on the surface, but deep down.

“One of the first things Paul Schrader asked me when we were working on Light of Day was what kind of relationship did I have with my family. And I told him, great. I don’t think that’s what he wanted to hear. I think he was hoping that I’d be … neurotic.”

Impish grin. Clank of metal biker bracelet against orange juice glass. If you’re looking for a strung-out tough chick who spits tacks at breakfast, forget it; this is a successful woman, all of 26 years old. Mom and Dad are proud. She picks up the checks. “Was everything all right?” asks the waitress.

“Yeah. It was really good, thank you, says Joan. “Have a nice day.”

A what?!

“I always say that,” she laughs. “’Cause it’s what they least expect.”

The movie offer came at the perfect time. In the years after I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll, Jett’s career had waned again; the next album only went gold, the next one sold less. There were problems between her and her record company, but the main problem was this: Joan Jett played rock ‘n’ roll, and her core audience was kids. “A lotta the radio stations that played our records started to go for those ‘upper demos’ and it got harder for us to get the airplay we used to have,” Kenny laments. And it was the “upper demographic” audience—people between the ages of, say, 25 and 25—that the radio stations were trying to sell to.

Still, Joan turned down Paul Schrader’s script five times before she decided to take the part of the wayward rock and roller daughter in Light of Day. Originally, Schrader had written the role for Bruce Springsteen, and the film was supposed to be called Born in the U.S.A. Springsteen didn’t want the part, but he liked the title a whole lot. In return for using it, he wrote Schrader a new title song for his movie: “Light of Day.”

Schrader kept looking for a rock singer to play the part, which had now become a female lead opposite brat pack heartthrob Michael J. Fox. There was one further qualification: Springsteen had final approval over who was gonna sing his song.

Joan didn’t want to do it. “I didn’t want to play a rock ‘n’ roll singer in a movie, ’cause I had this thing about people stereotyping me—y’know, thinking I was just playing myself. But the more I read the script, the more I realized this girl wasn’t like me. I was gonna have to act.” She took the part, hired an acting coach, and got to work.

When the reviews came out on Light of Day, almost all of them said the same thing: the movie was so-so, but Joan Jett is a star. She has … something. She’s a natural.

When the reviews came out, Joan Jett was reading them on her bus with her band, rolling through upstate New York in the dead of winter. “What else are gonna do?” says Kenny. “Sit around Hollywood and read scripts for six months? We don’t think movies are better than rock ‘n’ roll. To sell out a coliseum as a headliner is a much bigger rush than the whole movie/TV thing, dontcha think?”

She won’t talk to People magazine. She won’t wear skirts. She makes no compromises, and she’s managed to turn her obsession into a way of life that works. Two careers. Two families. A boyfriend. A band. Joan and Kenny really believe in rock ‘n’ roll, and they make me wish I could. But like the other upper demos who stand between Joan and another platinum record, I’m too young to understand what converted Kenny for life and too old to believe that the rock ‘n’ roll nation will rise again. Or even that it ever existed.

Anyway, here we are backstage at the Palace in Albany, and Joan’s getting ready to go on. Kenny’s pacing back and forth, nervous, bouncing between Joan and the stage manager with her set list, making changes. There are 20 songs on the sheet, everything from old Runaways hits to Jonathan Richman’s “Road Runner” to Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Crimson and Clover.” “Joan, if you get tired, you can always leave one out.”

Joan takes about five minutes to get ready. She wears a red leotard with nothing else on but a floppy black leather belt studded with grommets. If she looks boyish, it’s mostly because she’s got a body that’s been molded into shape over the last 12 years by the weight of a Gibson guitar: strong arms, tough chest, slightly rounded back. “Kenny, my stomach hurts so bad!” She just got her period. “It’ll feel better once I get out and start to play. It always does.”

She grabs a black magic marker from one of the roadies and scrawls a message on the dressing room wall: Joan Jett and ❤️ rool.

“Y’know,” says Kenny, out of nowhere, “rock ‘n’ roll is like this flickering light. It’s so fragile now, just hanging on. But I think it’s gonna rise again. Of course … I’ve been saying that for the last ten years.”

“It would make me so sad to see it all fade,” says Joan. “It would break my heart. The ideals of rock ‘n’ roll, how it started, the Rolling Stones, Chuck Berry. You want to teach kids about it. You want them to know. They stay home and they watch all these bands on TV. Well, you know that TV can never match what going to a real concert is.”

“Like when you wake up that morning, and as soon as you’re awake enough to remember, ‘Oh, I’m goin’ to a concert tonight’ you call up your best friend. You get excited, you figure out what you’re wearing, you decide where you’re gonna meet, and then you meet and you go to the venue, and you see all these other people, and you get more excited. Then the opening act comes on, and you’re more excited. And the lights go down and … whoa!

“I wanna make people feel happy like that. Smiling, getting out their anxieties and frustrations, yelling and screaming, fists up in the air. I guess that’s what makes me happy. And even in the suckiest of times, I can’t picture giving it up.”

Loud familiar music rises up from the PA system downstairs. “It’s the Who,” says Kenny. “We always go on to the Who. You should write that. That’s very important.” Joan runs down the steps to the stage and Kenny follows. “Yeah … and don’t forget to write that Joan Jett is the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll, okay?”

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.