Inventing Memory (27 page)

I wanted you. I was never happier than at your birth. But somewhere
along the line I lost my fight and surrendered to other forces. Perhaps I
was afraid to fight for fear of losing. The truth is, we have to concentrate
intently, keep attention focused every day of our lives. Without that we
slip and fall, slip and fail. Be the part of me that did not slip. Do not fail.
Fear passes if you keep on fighting. Just try to remember that. Some old
rabbi once said: "The whole world is like a very narrow bridge, and the
main thing is not to be afraid." I have become quite interested in Judaism
lately. There is great wisdom in our traditions—great and very diverse
wisdom. I am sorry now I never had you study to be
bat mitzvah,
but
other things distracted me. Like your father, who kept kidnapping you,
suing for custody, and all that shit. Besides, when you were thirteen you
were in Montana, thinking you were a goddamned Wasp! Never mind.
You come from a line of women who were
fighters.
And the hearts of
mothers and daughters beat in eternal unison.

The best part of me flowered in you.

All my love,

Sally

Sara read the letter and asked Shirlee how she came to have it.

"She gave it to me for safekeeping, with a few other things. When you are ready, I'm supposed to give them to you."

"How will you know when I'm ready?"

She laughed musically. "Oh," she said, "
you'll
know and you'll tell me."

"I'm not ready to be an orphan."

"Nobody is ready to be an orphan, yet we all are orphaned. And still we have an obligation to those who orphaned us. The past lives only in us. The dead live only in the living."

"But didn't
she
have an obligation to
me
?"

"She fulfilled it as best she could. She couldn't do what she couldn't do. Your job is to love her and forgive her. It could take a lifetime, but your freedom depends on it. Stay angry—and you are tied to her forever. Only forgiveness sets you free. She also wanted you to have this…." And Shirlee handed Sara a sheaf of papers, which she didn't read until she was back on the plane, flying home.

Transcript of Twentieth-Anniversary
Rolling Stone

Interview with Sally Sky

LONDON, 1989

Q: Let's just see if this is working. Testing, one, two, three…Okay. Let me just say how grateful I am to finally get to interview you—what with the twenty-year anniversary of Woodstock upcoming in August and—

A: How old were you at the first Woodstock? Five? Six?

Q: Well, ninish actually. But I have
read
everything about it.

A: And you want to know how an old-timer remembers it?

Q: A
legend
actually.

A: A legend is rarely young. (Laughs)

Q: Ms. Sky, if I didn't admire your music so much, I'd never have signed on for this.

A: That's what they all say. Then they stab you in the back. Luckily I have quote-approval.

Q: Let's go back to the beginning—how you fell in love with music, your first teacher, all that.

A: You didn't even read the
clips!

Q: I want to hear it in your words.

A: Well, I studied piano first with some old
yenta
called Lillian Zemann, or was it Lehmann—who can remember?—and then guitar with Mason Herbst, a legend in
my
time. He was the guy who collected all the Child ballads, started the folk revival, but never got credit for it since he was bloody
blacklisted
. Since my grandmother was a painter and my mother a writer, it seemed that folksinging was the only thing that really
belonged 
to me. My mother gave me a guitar when I was twelve, and I found myself in it. Took it absolutely
everywhere
, didn't feel safe unless it was hanging around my neck.

You could go
anywhere
in New York with a guitar in those days—Washington Square, the West Village, Central Park. All the stuff you call "the sixties" was well under way even the decade before—Beat poetry, drugs, the Merry Pranksters, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky—the lot. I wore my strawberry hair down to my ass, of course, and dressed all in black. The sackcloth-and-ashes look was very popular at the time. Had these rough-hewn Neanderthal sandals from Eighth Street. I was a regular nonconformist conformist—as my grandfather Levitsky loved to point out.

I started singing in the Village when I was—God knows—fourteen. It was a way of getting out of the house. And my house was
some
house: Papa, Mama—I mean my grandparents, of course—Salome, Robin, Marco—my parents (I had three of 'em)—not to mention 'Renzo, my brother, the bad seed. That was a joke. (Laughs)

Q: Tell me more about your brother.

A: I wish there were more to tell. He followed me into show business, but he didn't have the grit for it. He thought he was the Prince of Wales, and he got very good at choosing engraved stationery, playing polo, seducing starlets, squandering money, playing producer, but he never really produced very much. When his life proved to be a zero, he went into the family business and tried to destroy it. I was too busy destroying myself to stop him. Men were my drug of choice, and whatever drugs they were taking, I took. If I have any guilt about my life, it's for having been unconscious for so much of it.

Q: I find this astonishing. You? Guilty? What about the sexual revolution?

A: I hardly remember it.

Q: Ms. Sky, I find all this very hard to believe.

A: Of course you do. You were raised thinking Sally Sky was a
symbol of freedom
, not a person. Look, we were just kids who, like all kids, wanted to distinguish ourselves from our parents. In my case, that was hard since my parents were
already
weirdos. My mother had been in Paris in the thirties, with Henry Miller. And my grandfather was a big shot in the art world who knew
everybody—
Picasso to Pollock. I came to the music business because it was the only territory
left
for me. And I loved the music but hated the business part—the thievery, the mafiosi, the R and D men, the suits stealing money from the artists and manipulating their insecurities to facilitate this. The truth is, I never loved anything as much as the warmth coming across the footlights from the roaring crowd. I
always
knew what to do up there—how to move, which songs to sing, how to sashay with my guitar. I could
feel
what the audience wanted and give it to them. In any room, any club, any coffeehouse, any bar, I could get up there and suddenly know in my gut what songs they wanted to hear.

For a shy person it was extraordinary, a communion. It was only
offstage 
that I had a problem.

Q: Did you have any idea how significant Woodstock was going to be?

A: Are you kidding? A mud slide in Bethel, New York, with hundreds of thousands of kids and no toilets! We all thought it was a nightmare till 
Time
magazine told us it was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

Q: You mean you had
no idea?

A: None whatsoever. Listen, when
Listen to Your Voice
went off the charts, I had no idea what hit me. If you sell a million records in America, suddenly everyone wants to touch you for luck—as if you're God. That's very disconcerting. Stressful, you might say.

Q: Why?

A: Because there's
no way
you can live up to it, that's why. People want stuff from you that not even God can deliver. Salvation, for example. Or else they want to
become
you, suck up your talent by osmosis—which is impossible. So you have a very narrow window in which to be golden. Then you're dross. I always knew this. I knew a hit record or two or three wasn't a
life
. I knew I had to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. You may have noticed that many of my contemporaries didn't. Many of my contemporaries—you may have noticed—are dead. Which is actually preferable, in my opinion—or, as my grandfather used to say, "to mine opinion"—to living too long. I have no wish to be a centenarian, singing "Nobodaddy's Daughter" on my walker, getting a telegram from the White House at a hundred and three.

Q: What was the difference between you and all those who died too young?

A: Grace.

Q: I mean
really
. Our readers want to know.

A: Look. There's no way to talk about this stuff in
words
. Your readers can't learn from words. They have to want the answer so badly that they're banging their heads against a brick wall. Then maybe they'll listen. I reached a point where literally I couldn't get out of bed in the morning.

I was living with the man I thought was my great love—living in a five million-dollar beach house in Malibu. I had a hit record. The phone was ringing off the hook. People came by, offering me any drug I wanted.

There were tabloid photographers with telephoto lenses hiding in the bougainvillea. It's
supposed
to be the American dream, but I would lie in bed in the morning trying to think of ways not to get up ever
again
. I was terrified every time the phone rang. I really don't know how to talk about this stuff. By now it's
banal—
what with people confessing to recovery in public all the time. But it was no less real for that.

Q: There is a rumor about your disappearance.

A: It's not a rumor. I went away for a long time.

Q: What brought you back?

A: Am I back? (Laughs) I am not going to fall into the trap of talking about spirituality and recovery. When I say it can't be put into words, I mean it. It has to be
experienced
. Next…

Q: Tell me how you got the idea for your first big breakthrough album, 
Listen to Your Voice.

A: I think for women born in the forties, the idea of listening to your own voice was a new and radical thing, something that had to be
discovered.
We learned our craft singing traditional songs (that is, songs made by men, in which women were objectified as virgins, whores, dead virgins, dead whores), and we had to learn now how to sing in our own voices. We had to discover we had something to say.

Of course, the blues singers got there first. In the teens and twenties, African-American women discovered everything it took us a half century to discover—us white girls, I mean. They were
way ahead
of us—Ida Cox with her "Wild Women Don't Get the Blues," Bessie Smith with her "Empty Bed Blues," and "Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do."
They
were our role models, and we didn't even know it. White women had to go black to find their own voices. That's why Janis Joplin sang black and Mama Cass and countless others. Black women wrote about the tragedy of gutsy, feisty, independent women who still wanted to get laid.
They
were the avant garde. We're just catching up
now
. Not even…And most of them died broke, lost their copyrights to smalltime operators, couldn't get into hospitals when they were sick, because of Jim Crow laws, got hooked on drugs by their so-called lovers…. Their stories are hideous. Nothing I went through even comes
close.

But we couldn't even
hear
our own voices at first. Our struggle was just to
listen
to our own voices. Maybe that will be our legacy. I just happened to write the song that tuned into that struggle. But where my songs really came from I can't say. In that period I was able to take just about
anything
in my life and make a song of it with no self-consciousness at all.

"My Old Man" came straight out of a visit to my dad at the funny farm when I was four. "My Mother's Men" came out of the fact that my mother always had three or four guys she was rotating, including her husband Robin and her main man Marco. "Nobodaddy's Daughter" came out of reading William Blake with Max Danzig, my mentor. "Thorazine Dreams" was another song that came out of trying to identify with my crazy father—who was dead by the time I was five or six, but nobody told me. I had to find out for myself! Another story…

You write what you know, what you have at home. You don't even
think
about it. Only later, when it has become a phenomenon—read: "has made a lot of people rich"—do you analyze and answer questions about it. Then your innocence is gone. You analyze
after
the fact, but where the inspiration comes from is
mysterious
. It
has
to be. It is made underground. "We work in the dark, we do what we can—our work is our passion and our passion is our art. The rest is the madness of art." I think Henry James said that. I've probably misquoted it, but then I come from a family of aphorists. They always quoted everything, and they quoted everything askew.

Q: Some feminist critics have written that you gave your power away to men. They refer, of course, to your many marriages. Do you want to comment on that?

A: No. But I will. In a way, my generation was destined to find out who we were through the men in our lives. We tried on men as a way of trying on lives. In the beginning we didn't know that we could
have
those lives without using the men as the excuse. What we found out in the end was that we were actually much
stronger
than the men in our lives and that what weakened us was precisely our not
knowing
we were strong, looking for mentors, advisers, strong men, to father us. In my case, especially, since my father was certifiably insane and then certifiably dead by his own hand, I was always attracted to father figures, healers, doctors, shrinks. I married a few of them and lived to regret it.