Yeah, we were playing a black club and they don’t allow whites in there, just like they don’t allow blacks in white clubs. He used to drive a gravel truck.16 And I used to slip him behind a piano in those days. And Little Richard—he wrote the first three pages in my book and said his style came from me. You know, it’s the same thing with Jerry Lee Lewis—he’s a copy of me. Prince is a copy of me. A lot of things that are out are copies of me and what I do.
Maybe your book can help set the record straight.
TURNER: But it’s only being published in London. I tried all over America, and I hit a lot of stone walls, man. Because of that movie.
Separate from the movie, do you have regrets about anything?
TURNER: No, no, no, man. Today, man, my life is great. I’m proud of the way that I was with Tina and my kids. I don’t do nothing that I regret, man, because I’m not the one that they made me out to be in the movie. It’s like Tina always said: “If you knew Ike, you’d love him. But if you don’t know him—if you just look at the way he looks onstage”—because onstage, I be into my music and I ain’t thinking about how my face is looking . . .
So you think your reputation comes from the way your face looks onstage?
TURNER: I don’t know. I have no regrets of the past. I’m really happy with my accomplishments. I’m sorry that it had to get down to where they have to down me to launch her career. I think they could’ve did it without it. But anyway, I’ll get over it.
In 2007, Ike Turner died in his home in Southern California at the age of seventy-six. The cause was a cocaine overdose.
The moment Lady Gaga’s concert in Birmingham ended, she rushed from the stage to the tour bus, covered in stage blood. As the bus lurched out of the backstage parking lot, she heard a crowd screaming her name outside, then yelled to the bus driver: “Hold on, will you stop the bus? I’m just going to say hi to my fans.”
Her bodyguards looked disapprovingly at her, then relented. She walked to the door of the bus and opened it to see hundreds of fans stampeding toward her. The bodyguards quickly ordered the driver to shut the door. As the bus pulled away, Lady Gaga smiled, pleased, and walked back to continue the interview.
You have a lot of things in your behavior that are signs of someone who had a traumatic experience in adolescence or childhood. Is that something you would ever discuss publicly?
LADY GAGA (gasps): Probably not.
When Christina Aguilera began talking about the dark issues in her past, there was no negative response to it and it ended up informing her work.
LADY GAGA (hesitates): I feel like I tell this story in my own way and my fans know who I really am. I don’t want to teach them the wrong things. And you also have to be careful about how much you reveal to people that look up to you so much. They know who I am. They know how they can relate to me. I’ve laid it all on the table. And if they’re smart like you, they make that assessment. But I don’t want to be a bad example.
A bad example in the sense of being a victim?
LADY GAGA: Yeah, and I’m not a victim. And my message is positive. My show has a lovely naïveté and melancholy to it: a pop melancholy. That’s my art. If I told that other story in that way, I don’t know if that’s the best way I can help the universe.
Because if you did talk about it, then the things you do would be misinterpreted and seen through that experience?
LADY GAGA: Yeah. Maybe if I was writing my own book or something. I guess it’s hard to . . . If I say one thing in our interview right now, it will be all over the world the day after it hits the stands. And it would be twisted and turned. And it’s like you have to honor some things. Some things are sacred.
I understand.
LADY GAGA: There are some things that are so traumatic, I don’t even fully remember them. But I will say wholeheartedly that I had the most wonderful mother and father my whole life. I was never abused. I didn’t have a bad childhood. All of the things I went through were on my own quest for an artistic journey to fuck myself up like Warhol and Bowie and Mick, and just go for it.
That’s interesting that you have this idea that the artist has to expose himself to these dark parts of life.
LADY GAGA: You do, but all of the trauma I caused to myself (pauses). Or it was caused by people that I met when being outrageous and irresponsible. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I like to, within moderation, respect that I’m not Mick Jagger or David Bowie, and I don’t just have fans that are a certain age. There are, like, nine-year-olds listening to my music, so I guess I try to be respectful of who’s reading Rolling Stone, if at all possible.
You do talk about cocks and pussy all the time, but I know what you mean.
LADY GAGA: I do, but cock and pussy is not the same as the things that I could talk about.
We can talk about something more positive. You seem to have become more religious or spiritual in the last year or so.
LADY GAGA: I’ve had a few different experiences. I’m really connected to my Aunt Joanne and she’s not with us anymore. And then there was my father’s surgery. And also my life has changed so much. It’s hard not to believe that God hasn’t been watching out for me when I’ve had such obstacles with drugs and rejection and people not believing in me. It’s been a very long and continuous road that I love, but it’s hard to just chalk it all up to myself. I have to believe there’s something greater than myself.
Like a higher power?
LADY GAGA: Yeah, a higher power that’s been watching out for me. Sometimes it really freaks me out—or I should say it petrifies me—when I think about laying in my apartment [in New York] with bug bites from bedbugs and roaches on the floor and mirrors with cocaine everywhere, and no will or interest in doing anything but making music and getting high. So I guess I’ve come a really long way and I have my friends to thank for that—and I have God.
[Continued . . .]
According to Ali Farka Touré, the world-famous African bluesman, spirits are at the root of all art. And if the spirits love a human being, they give him power. However, at the time of this interview, he had little time to spend in the spirit plane. After winning a Grammy for an album he recorded with Ry Cooder, which spent a record-breaking sixteen weeks at number one on the Billboard world music chart, he had to cancel a North American tour to stay home and protect his family from attacks by Tuareg nomads, who were fighting with the Malian government. Some of that hostility may have carried over into our interview, which was conducted through an interpreter when he was in Paris shortly afterward. It may also be worth noting that he was given the nickname Farka, or donkey, shortly after birth because of his stubbornness.
Is everything okay at home now?
ALI FARKA TOURÉ: There was nothing, okay. It was just a little incident.
Is this the first time you’ve left since the attacks?
TOURÉ: It’s the first time I’ve