"I don't want to talk about that."
I've known William for over thirty years now. William is my dad. He's seventy years old. A lot of my friends like talking to him. He calls me at least three times every day. It can be really difficult getting off the phone with him. I love William. I love my dad. So naturally I interviewed him to get to the bottom of it all.
He was visiting so we got coffee at Blue Bottle and ate at Zinc. We talked about some of his beginnings. We talked about his introductions to music. We talked about why he doesn't want me to kiss him on the lips.
Maybe I'll do some more interviews with him in the future. He isn't dying anytime soon.
William drinks a mango and spinach smoothie.
Painful Burning:
When were you born?
William:
A long time ago.
Painful Burning:
Can you be more specific?
William:
I was born in the spring of '44.
Painful Burning:
Can you be more specific than that?
William:
No, spring of '44.
Painful Burning:
Why don't you say your birthday?
William:
Because I don't want anybody to know.
Painful Burning:
Why?
William:
I don't think it should be out there. Once you get your birth date they can know exactly what's going on inside you.
Painful Burning:
And you don't want people to know that?
William:
No, because I'm not my chart anymore.
Painful Burning:
So this is because of astrology?
William:
And numerology. And I'm not my chart anymore. In other words, I'm not my ego structure. There's ways of transcending beyond it.
Painful Burning:
And you've transcended that?
William:
Well, no, because my whole chart says I'm transcendent.
Painful Burning:
So we now know when you were born, roughly, when are you going to die?
William:
Probably in my nineties close to one hundred. Unless the whole world goes before I die, which it might.
Painful Burning:
Do you remember the first time you listened to music?
William:
Yeah. I was... I'm trying to remember what age I was. I heard Lymon singing, "Why Do Fools Fall In Love." I was in a school bus in Far Rockaway, Queens, by the ocean, I was in a camp bus and I heard Frankie Lymon singing, "Why Do Fools Fall In Love." I just fell in love with it. Then I started falling in love with doo-wop because I worked in a diner.
Painful Burning:
What age was that?
William:
Eleven, or something like that. I was falling in love with doo-wop because it was played on an old jukebox. All of a sudden it was all about the music. Always.
Painful Burning:
Do you remember the first time you heard rock 'n' roll?
William:
I remember Chuck Berry and all those type of guys. I remember when the rock 'n' roll bin was only a foot or two of rock 'n' roll. That was all. It was far from full. I suspect Elvis was a big part of changing that, exposing it. And rockabilly as well... "Rebel Rouser" by Duane Eddy.
William hanging out with Ross in Bolinas.
Painful Burning:
What did you think of rock 'n' roll when you first heard it?
William:
I think back in those days everybody loved it, or at least I did. The only thing is now you have your phone and you have your music things you can take with you. There was nothing to put in the car, there were no tape decks. Nothing. So you were totally dependent on the music show that you were listening to. Back in New York it was Alan Freed, Wolfman Jack, or people like this. You were dependent on them. You thought you had found yourself in a secret world of music that adults didn't listen to. And the music was so good. You could only hear it on the radio, if your car had a radio. Not all cars had radios.
Painful Burning:
So when you traveled on the subway in New York you were without music.
William:
No walkmens, no iPods.
Painful Burning:
In the sixties it seems like marijuana became a big part of mainstream culture.
William:
Very late fifties, very late fifties for some of us who were in the know. Late fifties, early sixties is when it all started to happen. But in those days there were no hippies. It was beatniks, bohemians, you had to be an artist.
Painful Burning:
Did music just change in the sixties when everybody started smoking weed?
William:
Smoking weed and doing hallucinogenics.
Painful Burning:
Do you remember the change? When you put on the radio and it sounded psychedelic? Or was it a gradual change?
William:
By the time I was into it, it was psychedelic like 13th Floor Elevators and groups like that. The psychedelic sounds starting coming through, The Beatles and the Stones, they had albums that made it obvious they were heavy into acid and stuff like this. There was a whole culture that was built around this called the hippies which was real different that the beatniks. Because for the beatniks you had to be an artist, a bohemian, an intellectual. While for the hippies all you had to do was do drugs and then you were okay. Most people didn't do alcohol it was just drugs, pot... Which isn't really a drug anymore. But, all the hallucinogens, mushrooms, all those things were popular. The music went to feed that kind of stuff. So did the fashions, so did the lava lamps. By the time I was getting out of it, everybody was getting into it in the seventies. They were starting to move into the direction that some of us were already moving out of. You grew your hair long, tried to grow a beard, and patched up your jeans.
Painful Burning:
What about the weekend hippies?
William:
Those were the people who backed their bed by working and going to college and getting regular jobs. Then on the weekend they would costume it and try to be hip and cool. Opposed to us, for instance living communally and living on ranches and farms in the middle of nowhere. Running around doing hippie stuff.
Painful Burning:
Do you find any of the youth culture today mimicking that?
William:
Completely. I think we established certain historical reference points in this country for music and art in the fifties and sixties. But now they don't have the passion for creativity we had. It's now like hip-hop, just sampling the past.
Painful Burning:
How is it different now than how it was? Not technologically.
William:
You can't separate it. Technology has changed everything. iPods, cell phones.
Painful Burning:
So you think technology has dictated a difference in youth culture today?
William:
Yeah.
Painful Burning:
How is it different?
William:
Back in New York City, when I was growing up, people always carried books around. You'd always see them reading somewhere. Even if it was magazines or a newspaper. I think that's all disappearing, people are always on their cell phones or iPads or whatever they have. I don't see anybody reading anymore.
Painful Burning:
They're reading on their phone. Now you can read the newspaper on your phone.
William:
That's true. But I don't know if they're reading books. Like I'm trying to get you to read that Thomas Ligotti book. I don't know if you're going to read it.
William points to the Blue Bottle.
Painful Burning:
What have you been listening to lately?
William:
I like a lot of stuff, so I can listen to everything. The older Murder City Devils albums to what-was-that... Endangered Dragon. "Breathing in the chemicals, waiting for the apocalypse." That sounds really cool. There's some really good covers of that song.
Painful Burning:
That you found on YouTube?
William:
Yeah, I love YouTube.
Painful Burning:
Is that your favorite way of listening to music now? It's like a giant jukebox.
William:
Yeah, I like to go listen to Emmy Lou Harris or some guys out of the forties and fifties that sang country or even Iggy Pop. All that stuff. Sometimes it's what you tell me. We'll talk about it and then I start looking it up. Or what Ross says. Or what Skyler says. Even Tristan influences some of my listening. I really like watching Assassin's Creed and figuring out the philosophical reality of the game.
Painful Burning:
You don't own any video game systems but you like watching clips of the games on YouTube?
William:
Yeah, where the music is cool and the guy runs around killing everybody. That's pretty cool, the way he does it, the guy in Assassin's Creed. Because he's going through time and space. Philosophically he goes through it by going through phylogenetic ancestral memory banks which I've been talking about for forty years.
Painful Burning:
I don't need to hear about that right now. Do you feel like all the contemporary music is mimicking the music from your youth?
William:
I think people are sampling everything. Unless you're going to devise a brand new music, like my generation was part of, today, you can't do that. Because what are you going to do? You're either going to sound like doo-wop, if you got backups, you're going to sound like rockabilly, you're going to sound like country and western, you're going to sound like bluegrass music, you're going to sound like music from England, you're going to sound like... I don't know, the Fine Young Cannibals, or whatever. Whatever it is you grew up with you're going to sample. You might say, "I'm just sampling the latest guys." Yeah, but you're sampling the latest guys that sampled the older guys.
Painful Burning:
By sampled you mean taking influence from.
William:
Yeah.
Painful Burning:
Not literally sampling.
William:
No. But some if it sure sounds like it.
Painful Burning:
That's funny you say your generation devised a brand new music because you had no part in it, you weren't in any bands.
William:
Actually, Zed, I was in two bands at the time but not very long. I wasn't very good.
Painful Burning:
What did you do in those bands?
William:
I played drums for a while and I played harp. And I tried to sing but it didn't work. It's not my thing.
Painful Burning:
Why didn't it work? Were you not a good singer?
William:
I'm not a good singer. My harp was just beginnings. My drumming... I didn't really pursue that so.
William stands firmly outside Zinc.
Painful Burning:
Why do you get so weird when I try to kiss you on the lips?
William:
I don't even want to talk about it, it's so dumb.
Painful Burning:
Why is it dumb, if you love someone shouldn't you be able to kiss them on the lips?
William:
I don't mind doing that but when you start doing it just to get attention in front of people...
Painful Burning:
Why do you think it's to get attention, why don't you think it's because I love you?
William:
I don't know. I don't want to talk about that.
Painful Burning:
Why?
William:
I don't know. It's okay, I don't care.
Painful Burning:
You've crossed urine streams with me.
William:
That's true, we have. Why do you make this personal? I want to talk about abstractional things. I don't just want to talk about peeing and psychologically analyzing each other at this moment.
Painful Burning:
Do you think men should pee with each other and kiss each other on the lips?
William:
Yeah, I think it's fine.
Painful Burning:
In the sixties did you ever do that?
William:
No, you hugged your friends a lot.
Painful Burning:
Did you ever kiss any of your friends?
William:
Yeah, I kissed them on the cheek and they kissed me. Sometimes they said they loved me, and I loved them.
Painful Burning:
Did you ever experiment with guys in the sixties?
William:
No. No.
Painful Burning:
Are you sure?
William:
Unless I was passed out.
Painful Burning:
So you're saying it was possible?
William:
I don't know. If I was passed out on something, I don't know.
Painful Burning:
You're saying it was possible in the sixties that you were passed out multiple times and you hooked up with guys?
William:
I don't remember any of that, Zed.
Painful Burning:
You don't remember but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.
William:
Unlikely.
Painful Burning:
Does mom know about this?
William:
Know about what?
Painful Burning:
About the possibility of you hooking up with guys.
William:
Who said hooking up? What are you doing here? I did not hook up. I don't like guys that way.
Painful Burning:
So mom doesn't know about this?
William:
Here we go, pursuing this. I want to take this to another level and you want to take it here. When did you become so psychological, Zed?
Painful Burning:
Just answer the question.
William:
I'm saying anything is possible. For all I know maybe I was touched when I was three months old.
Painful Burning:
Does mom know you were touched when you were three months old?
William:
I'll have to talk to my father and find out whether or not.
Painful Burning:
Isn't he dead?
William:
I'll have to talk to him somehow if he ever touched me inappropriately. I'll have to talk to him on the other side. But I don't think so because he was really into girls. Or he seemed to be. Maybe he was just one of those guys who pretended that he was but was really into guys.
Painful Burning:
Are you one of those guys?
William:
No.
Painful Burning:
Do you mind if mom reads this interview?
William:
About what?
Painful Burning:
Just this entire interview?
William:
Oh, this is an interview?
Painful Burning:
I'm recording this.
William:
Oh.
William crosses his arms.
Painful Burning:
You knew that.
William:
No, I just thought you were going to take a part of it. Can we talk about something else? I don't want to talk about that shit. I want to talk about other things.
Painful Burning:
What do you want to talk about? What are the subjects you want to talk about?
William:
Like, I'm not impressed by this planet. That's what I'd really like to get into.
Painful Burning:
What else?
William:
The ontology and beginnings of consciousness as we know it and particularly to this planet and where it's all going and why it's going there and how to witness correctly by being objectively observant. And what's reality and how do we talk about these things? And why are we all working so hard? What is it that you got to work for? Who made that law up? You got to have a job? What is that law?
Painful Burning:
When was the last time you smoked weed?
William:
Probably when I was twenty three. So what's twenty three from seventy?
Painful Burning:
Forty seven.
William:
Probably about forty seven years ago.
Painful Burning:
Do you think you're still high?
William:
That's also when I stopped doing all the hallucinogens.
Painful Burning:
Do you think you're still a little high? Or have you always been this way?
William:
I've always been this way. You don't want to hear about all my stories of what happened to me when I was four or five years old in the marshlands of Brooklyn, do you?
Painful Burning:
Not really.
William:
Well I could tell you all those stories.
Painful Burning:
What are you implying? We don't have to get too deep into those stories.
William:
Some of us are born this way.
Painful Burning:
What does that mean?
William:
That I'm schizophrenic. I have one leg in reality and one leg in what is it not assumed for most people is reality.
Painful Burning:
And this happened in the marshlands?
William:
Do you remember when you were born? Can you actually remember crawling around?
Painful Burning:
No.
William:
I can remember crawling around.
Painful Burning:
I'm asking you the questions, you can't ask me questions.
William:
So there I was in the marshlands-
Painful Burning:
-Just sum it up in a sentence.
William:
It was not of this Earth the way normal people are.
Painful Burning:
What is not of this Earth?
William:
The experiences I had.
Painful Burning:
What are you implying?
William:
There are unearthly realities. Most people are stuck with just being on Earth.
Painful Burning:
In one sentence what happened in the marshlands?
William:
I got in touch with other realities at about four or five years old walking by myself in the marshlands off the ocean for long times.
Painful Burning:
Where were these marshlands?
William:
In Brooklyn. I experienced things. At one point I didn't come home until the sun came down. Grandma got real scared because I was experiencing an ecstatic blissed out kind of reality but she thought someone had taken me or something. When I told her about it she thought I had a sun stroke.
Painful Burning:
Do you have any worries about this interview?
William:
I hope you quote me correctly.
Painful Burning:
Do you have any negative criticisms about me, your son?
William:
You don't talk to me enough.
Painful Burning:
That's the end.
William:
I want more.
Painful Burning:
That the end of the interview.
William:
What kind of interview is that?
Painful Burning:
It's the one we just had.
William:
I want more.
Painful Burning:
You'll have to wait until next time. Bye.
William is being loved.
-Z
