Girl in a Band

Personally, I like when things fall apart—that’s real entertainment, deconstructed.

Music that could only have come out of New York’s bohemian downtown art scene and the people in it—Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground, Allen Ginsberg, John Cage, Glenn Branca, Patti Smith, Television, Richard Hell, Blondie, the Ramones, Lydia Lunch, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and the free-jazz loft scene. I remember the thrilling power of loud guitars and finding kindred souls and the man I married, who I believed was my soul mate.

It’s the strangest feeling, rediscovering your own self and, if enough time has gone by, listening to it without hating it. It is sort of like looking at old photos of yourself and realizing you looked pretty good after all

Guys playing music. I loved music. I wanted to push up close to whatever it was men felt when they were together onstage—to try to ink in that invisible thing. It wasn’t sexual, but it wasn’t unsexual either.

I’ve spent a lot of time in Berlin, and the Germans have all these great words with multiple meanings inside them. A few visits ago, I came across one of those words, Maskenfreiheit. It means “the freedom conferred by masks.”

The couple everyone believed was golden and normal and eternally intact, who gave younger musicians hope they could outlast a crazy rock-and-roll world, was now just another cliché of middle-aged relationship failure—a male midlife crisis, another woman, a double life

He had the Mick Jagger lips, and the lanky arms and legs he didn’t seem to know what to do with, and the wariness you see in tall men who don’t want to overpower other people with their height.

Someone once wrote that in between the lives we lead and the lives we fantasize about living is the place in our heads where most of us actually live.

This was the late fifties and early sixties—people took their cocktail hours seriously

Onstage, people have told me, I’m opaque or mysterious or enigmatic or even cold. But more than any of those things, I’m extremely shy and sensitive, as if I can feel all the emotions swirling around a room. And believe me when I say that once you push past my persona, there aren’t any defenses there at all.