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INTERVIEW SIX: "Have you patterned yourself after any people in show business, like the Marx Brothers?" "No. My idols are Frank Sinatra and Fatty Arbuckle." "Really, ah, I was wondering by asking that question what makes you put a large colored lady in a witness box and have her identify herself as J. Edgar Hoover?" "What else do you do with a large colored lady? There are so many of them in the States."
It's Friday afternoon and Woody is walking in Hyde Park, unrecognized, he's sitting on benches and standing in bus queues, for a photographer.
"I'm a purist." Woody says, eyeing a bee that is hovering near his head, "I don't drink or smoke cigarettes. I never get high or take acid. The thought of putting anything foreign in my system offends me."
"When I was in Play It Again Sam, I didn't work on Moratorium Day, for my own reasons. Kids came to me and said, "That's great, man." It seems so easy now, to salt things with relevant themes. "The kids are exploitable. They've made a lot of millionaires in the last ten years, what with drugs and records and clothes. Music is just too easy. I like it, but their excuse for not reading, for not thinking... and then they hang it on McLuhan's global electric thing... "I went to see Woodstock... which cost five dollars. The kid in front of me kept saying, "Beautiful, Beautiful" as though he were trying to convince himself. John Sebastian sings a song about kids and everyone shouts. There's no discrimination or real art involved in it at all."
Five lanes of traffic whiz along Park Lane, the street Woody needs to cross to get back to his suite. "The truth is," he said, "There have never been very many remarkable people around at any one time. Most are always leaning on the guy next to them, asking him what to do."
He stood on the curb, a very slight man with red hair, and waited a long, long time for a pause in the flow of cars. Finally it came and he scooted across the avenue back to his hotel.
INTERVIEW SEVEN: "Mr. Allen, let me ask you a question I have always wanted to ask someone in your line, did anything funny happen to you on the way over here?" "A comedian is often asked that question. Nothing funny has ever happened to me on my way to the theater. My life is not a series of amusing incidents."
First published in "Rolling Stone", September 30, 1971
This article is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author. Robert B. Greenfield has recently published a book, "Dark Star: an Oral Biography of Jerry Garcia". He is currently working on another about Timothy Leary and is involved in several theatre and film projects.
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