to attack him. As he does this, I look up at one of his paintings—the bandaged, decomposed head that stares fearfully from his album covers—and realize: It’s a self-portrait.
The following day, Miller sells the painting to me for forty dollars and checks himself into rehab. Several weeks later, he returns, clean-shaven, well-nourished, and wearing newly bought clothes. The first thing he does is buy the painting back from me. As for his paranoid reaction during our last encounter, he explains . . .
MILLER: I have a feeling I just staged that so we wouldn’t go out.
After relapsing later that year, Miller moved near his family in Los Angeles to clean up. We remained friends until he died in 2003 of hepatitis C, a blood-borne disease that he most likely contracted from a used needle.
Dude, what are you doing? If you don’t want to do this interview . . .
JULIAN CASABLANCAS: One day maybe I’ll be able to communicate it better. But it’s not where we’re at right now. I just don’t have anything deep to say. I’m trying to do it. I don’t know.
I don’t expect anything deep from you. I just want you to be yourself.
CASABLANCAS: I’ve got nothing to hide. But what I meant a few minutes ago, if I can even recall what I was saying, is just that there’s so much shit to do and so little time. And everything I have to say is not going to be in this one Rolling Stone interview.
I hope not.
CASABLANCAS: There’s a lot of stuff to do and it’s going to be a long, hard road. If anything, it’s just the beginning. And I’d like to get our foot in the door, and just get to a point where maybe we can say something that will be matterful. That’s definitely not a word, by the way. And I look forward to the future, blah, blah, blah, blah. (Stops the tape; I start it again.) I mean, really, no one wants to hear what I have to say. No one cares.
Fine. Let’s have a regular conversation, not an interview, and just leave the tape recorder running.
CASABLANCAS: Okay, here’s the thing. It’s not time yet. God, or whoever it is that controls things, is telling me not to say anything. People don’t believe in us yet. They don’t think we’re serious or real or whatever. And I can’t say anything until we’ve done something undeniable as a band.
Strokes manager Ryan Gentles enters the bar.
RYAN GENTLES: How’s the interview going?
We’ve got seven minutes of tape so far.
GENTLES: Seven minutes is all you have? (To Julian:) You need to do this.
CASABLANCAS: What are you working for, me or Rolling Stone? It’s like there’s an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, and then a gay manager on my sleeve.
Your picture is going to be on the cover. Most people with pictures on the cover talk inside.
CASABLANCAS: You are a complainer. You’ve got enough. Work with what you’ve got. You’re a professional. God bless America.
Casablancas picks up a bottle of beer, downs three quarters in one gulp, and slams it to the table. He mumbles something about RCA Records president Clive Davis speaking “like a gay chorus girl,” stands up, and walks to the video game Golden Tee Golf. He turns around and addresses the bar.
CASABLANCAS: Anyone want to play Golden Tee?
When no one responds, he plays alone. Four minutes later, he returns to the table.
CASABLANCAS: Never play Golden Tee when you’re drunk.
He then sits on my lap, kisses me seven times on the neck, and makes three lunges for my lips, connecting once. Before I can wipe dry, he is out the door, rolling himself home in an abandoned wheelchair he finds outside.
[Continued . . .]
If you met the man who composed one of America’s most patriotic songs, what would you ask him?
At halftime one Sunday at the Adelphia Coliseum in Nashville, Tennessee, country singer Lee Greenwood ran out to sing the anthem he had written eighteen years earlier, “God Bless the U.S.A.” The stadium thundered with the sound of tens of thousands of voices singing along, “I’m proud to be an American.”
As Greenwood trotted to the sidelines afterward, a photographer pulled an American flag out of his satchel and asked him to pose with it. “I don’t want to seem cheap or disgrace the flag,” Greenwood responded, declining. “I don’t even sign them anymore.”
Is there ever a moment when you don’t feel proud to be an American?
LEE GREENWOOD: You mean that I don’t believe the lyrics of my own song?
In the moment. Like if you sing “I love my wife” in a song, there might be a moment when you don’t feel that.
GREENWOOD: No, I don’t. I mean, we’ll have arguments like everybody else, but very few and that’s what keeps our union strong. But no, when I’m singing, I believe everything I sing.
What if there’s a president who’s not making decisions you agree with?
GREENWOOD: I don’t . . . You know, the song first of all is not political. And I may not agree with a Democrat who’s in office, but you know, if they ask me to sing at the White House, I’d sing in a heartbeat because he’s the president. Anybody who has military service, I recognize and respect for what they’ve done.
Some people have criticized you for singing about how you’d defend America, but not serving in the Vietnam War.
GREENWOOD: When I went to join the service in the sixties, I had two children. And so I wasn’t picked until they got to my number and it was too late. So that was the reason I didn’t serve. But my father felt it necessary to join the war in 1943. I was a year old and my sister was three. At that time, I guess the government didn’t consider it a threat or a liability if you had children. But when he joined the Navy, my mother never forgave him and divorced him because of it. So I think that’s an issue for me.
So there must be something that bothers you about this country?
GREENWOOD: Inasmuch as . . . I guess it’s capital punishment that bothers me. We don’t want to be barbaric, but at the same time, it used to be an eye for an eye. You killed a person, and you went to jail or you went to the chair. Then you had to kill two or three people to go to the chair. And now it’s mass murder. How many do you have to kill before you have to give up your life? It diminishes the value of one person’s life. That’s why our view on capital punishment, I think, weakens us in the eyes of other nations.
Then there are other countries who think we’re barbaric for even having the death penalty.
GREENWOOD: Yeah, well, I like what the Marines say.
Which is?
GREENWOOD: “It’s up to God to judge bin Laden. It’s up to the Marines to make sure he keeps the appointment.”