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Blu..for u...excerpts re the early days
...and I presented to Bob a fair Danish princess,an extraordinary and fragile beauty named Mooskie-with the whitest ivory skin and steel-blue eyes, lithe and nearly as tall as he- who resided on the eleventh floor of the tower after having left her boyfriend Francoise de Menil, the filmmaker who had shot a film for me called Mask with a high-speed camera at four thousand frames per second...........Francoise was the son of the de Menils, the patrons of the arts who started the Dia Art Foundation with the money from royalties from the patent of a particular drill bit used by almost every oil driller on the planet...and how ironic , my previous infatuation with death now transformed by Rasta into a rich and viceral love of life eternal....
And Bob glowed around Mooskie, who adored him, knowing that when the week was up she may or may not but caring not and lavishing in the moments flowing like the evening traffic down Seventh Avenue-the sprinkling of headlights at dusk and the sun setting beyond the Hudson River....and she would take his arm and guide him through the teeming concrete corridors and Bob's smile thrilling with his prize and I would join them....Mooskie leading through the red, gold and green October of Central Park and on to the lavish prewar apartments of my herb-dealing friends, the intractable search for the better draw where inevitably the sounds from the best stereos would be blasting Catch a Fire.....and for this eventful week we owned the soul of the cultural epicenter of the Western world and began to transform profoundly and irrevocably the heart of popular music everywhere else on Jah's earth.....
RS And did Bob meet Springsteen at that time?
LJ Not at the sound check.Bob really didn't really care about Springsteen. He would have been impressed to meet Curtis Mayfield.
RS Did they ever sit through any of Springsteen's sets?
LJ Yeah, because we were there. What were we going to do? We were playing two sets a night and three on the weekend.
RS They didn't care for his music?
LJ I don't think it was that they didn't care for it. I thought they thought he was good enough-
RS - to be on the same bill with them?
LF (laughs) No, it wasn't like that. It was just like wide-eyed, you know, this was like another world. I mean, we were all of a sudden right in the center of the heart of rock and roll glamourdom.
RS. The epicenter of hipness
LJ Without a doubt.THis was it. This was the place int he world, the hippest place in the world you could possibly play, opening for Bruce Springsteen at his first Columbia Records show. I mean, everybody who was anybody was there that week. I mean, more than once. We were playing two shows a night, and this was the kind of thing where people came more than once..every writer,everybody from the fashion world, every musician that meant anythign who was in NY had to go there....and we wer there,and by the end of the week everybody knew who we were...and it wasn't like Sly and the Family Stone where we just played and everybody just sat there. We were blowing people's minds! People were flipping out over us...i mean it was incredible...we were getting amazing respect...it started the love affair of the press with the Wailers that week...and it never ended
RS. Were there any Jamaicans there in the audience that week?
LJ No no
Rs That's not the kind of club they would go to normally?
LJ The invisible shield at Max's !(laughs) And you couldn't get in these dates. ....
RS The Marvin Gaye concert in 1974 found you onstage with the Wailers..what do u remember?
LJ It was at the Carib Theatre which held about 2500 people...what it really was is a big Marvin Gaye event...at the time he was at the height of his worldwide popularity and in Jamaica they are very picky about what kind of American music thy like and Marvin Gaye was special....a lot of the popularity had to do with the social and political themes of the songs on the What's GOing On album...he showed up in Jamaica with a 70 piece orchestra....the promoter added the Wailers onto the show but nobody really believed they would play, because they hadn't played in Jamaica in many years and several previous show had falsely advertised the Wailers...the reason we played the show was that everyone was jus swept up in the vibe...there was a new Wailers single out and it was a smash and we felt we wouldn't be overshadowed by Marvin, that even with his huge crew he couldn't upstage us...and that proved to be true.....
excerpt of interview bet RS and LJ
...and I presented to Bob a fair Danish princess,an extraordinary and fragile beauty named Mooskie-with the whitest ivory skin and steel-blue eyes, lithe and nearly as tall as he- who resided on the eleventh floor of the tower after having left her boyfriend Francoise de Menil, the filmmaker who had shot a film for me called Mask with a high-speed camera at four thousand frames per second...........Francoise was the son of the de Menils, the patrons of the arts who started the Dia Art Foundation with the money from royalties from the patent of a particular drill bit used by almost every oil driller on the planet...and how ironic , my previous infatuation with death now transformed by Rasta into a rich and viceral love of life eternal....
And Bob glowed around Mooskie, who adored him, knowing that when the week was up she may or may not but caring not and lavishing in the moments flowing like the evening traffic down Seventh Avenue-the sprinkling of headlights at dusk and the sun setting beyond the Hudson River....and she would take his arm and guide him through the teeming concrete corridors and Bob's smile thrilling with his prize and I would join them....Mooskie leading through the red, gold and green October of Central Park and on to the lavish prewar apartments of my herb-dealing friends, the intractable search for the better draw where inevitably the sounds from the best stereos would be blasting Catch a Fire.....and for this eventful week we owned the soul of the cultural epicenter of the Western world and began to transform profoundly and irrevocably the heart of popular music everywhere else on Jah's earth.....
RS And did Bob meet Springsteen at that time?
LJ Not at the sound check.Bob really didn't really care about Springsteen. He would have been impressed to meet Curtis Mayfield.
RS Did they ever sit through any of Springsteen's sets?
LJ Yeah, because we were there. What were we going to do? We were playing two sets a night and three on the weekend.
RS They didn't care for his music?
LJ I don't think it was that they didn't care for it. I thought they thought he was good enough-
RS - to be on the same bill with them?
LF (laughs) No, it wasn't like that. It was just like wide-eyed, you know, this was like another world. I mean, we were all of a sudden right in the center of the heart of rock and roll glamourdom.
RS. The epicenter of hipness
LJ Without a doubt.THis was it. This was the place int he world, the hippest place in the world you could possibly play, opening for Bruce Springsteen at his first Columbia Records show. I mean, everybody who was anybody was there that week. I mean, more than once. We were playing two shows a night, and this was the kind of thing where people came more than once..every writer,everybody from the fashion world, every musician that meant anythign who was in NY had to go there....and we wer there,and by the end of the week everybody knew who we were...and it wasn't like Sly and the Family Stone where we just played and everybody just sat there. We were blowing people's minds! People were flipping out over us...i mean it was incredible...we were getting amazing respect...it started the love affair of the press with the Wailers that week...and it never ended
RS. Were there any Jamaicans there in the audience that week?
LJ No no
Rs That's not the kind of club they would go to normally?
LJ The invisible shield at Max's !(laughs) And you couldn't get in these dates. ....
RS The Marvin Gaye concert in 1974 found you onstage with the Wailers..what do u remember?
LJ It was at the Carib Theatre which held about 2500 people...what it really was is a big Marvin Gaye event...at the time he was at the height of his worldwide popularity and in Jamaica they are very picky about what kind of American music thy like and Marvin Gaye was special....a lot of the popularity had to do with the social and political themes of the songs on the What's GOing On album...he showed up in Jamaica with a 70 piece orchestra....the promoter added the Wailers onto the show but nobody really believed they would play, because they hadn't played in Jamaica in many years and several previous show had falsely advertised the Wailers...the reason we played the show was that everyone was jus swept up in the vibe...there was a new Wailers single out and it was a smash and we felt we wouldn't be overshadowed by Marvin, that even with his huge crew he couldn't upstage us...and that proved to be true.....
excerpt of interview bet RS and LJ
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