Q: Your love of Harry Smith’s American folk music anthologies was something I wasn’t entirely familiar with. We’re constantly evolving and constantly transcending one moment to the next moment yet including everything that we’ve ever been. You know it’s impossible for a person to leave a complete image of themselves anyway because there’s so much going on in our heads. You have to decide whether you’re going to wind up scorned or forgotten or leave an incomplete picture of yourself. Q: There’s a line in it that caught my attention where you say, ‘It’s best to leave an incomplete picture of yourself’ – why do you feel that way?Ī: Anyone who’s in the public, no matter how much of it or how small, would eventually wind up scorned. I said this is a good take on an aspect of my life. I only cringed two or three times, and usually that was just about a turn of phrase as opposed to something that I actually did. It was nice talking to her, because I was able to get a word in edgewise.Īnd this one, when I saw it I thought it’s kind of interesting to me. She just asked me questions and we had – I guess you could say it was a dialogue, but I guess maybe they edited it so that it was mainly me talking. And I usually just say no because every time – I’ve done one or two in the past – I saw myself I’m just like, ‘Oh my God, who is this guy and what’s he talking about?’Ī: Well, our daughter Leah was the inquisitor in those sections. Often, I’m asked to be in documentaries about certain aspects of show business. Why is that?Ī: I’ve said this many times. Q: I’ve seen you talk about your reluctance to appear in documentaries on punk or rock or New York City in the ’70s. But then I was persuaded to be whatever you want to call it, the subject – or the victim. Though we didn’t go into a theater because then COVID came. Q: What was it like for you to spend time in your past, singing songs from the New York Dolls, your solo career, from Buster?Ī: It was fun to do. Essentially, I think their idea was, ‘Let’s shoot the concert and then we’ll figure it out.’ I mean, there was no plan in the beginning. Then they got an archivist who was very good, I think, who started digging up stuff and – voila. I think they were still doing some Fran Lebowitz editing (for Scorsese’s 2021 docuseries “Pretend It’s a City”) as I recall. So they shot the concert and then they kind of fooled around with it for a little while. Q: Did it start as a concert film or was it always going to be a concert mixed with archival and interviews?Ī: This was like January of 2020 and you know the plague was about to break out. And my wife, Mara (Hennessey), she called Marty (Scorsese) and asked him to come and see it so he could kind of advise us about where to go with it.Īnd when he saw it, the same night, he said, ‘Oh, I want to shoot this.’ So to make a long story short, that’s how it came about.” We were looking for some off-Broadway kind of something. A: Well, we were doing this two-week run at the Carlyle, and we had – my wife and I – this novel idea of having Buster do Johansen as opposed to what Buster usually does, like a lot of curated covers, you might say.
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