Neil Before The Master

Author and journalist Neil Strauss is above all else a pro. Such a pro that at the conclusion of our interview, when the tape’s turned off, he improvises a prospective opening para for this article: ‘Neil Strauss... Shelbourne Hotel... jet-lagged from his book tour...’ He then proposes that when I draft my opening para I should send it to him to rewrite, just for a laugh. Alas, deadline constraints prove prohibitive. But for the record, here’s what I would’ve sent:

‘Neil Strauss, Rolling Stone and NY Times journalist, like many of the public figures he’s interviewed, is smaller than you’d expect, greyhound skinny in stylish tight pants and pullover, almost elfin, bit of a charmer...
And so on. You might know Strauss from books like The Game, his new-journalistic foray into the LA pick-up artist subculture, or his car-crash compelling Mötley Crüe biography The Dirt, or his survivalist handbook Emergency, or his collaborations with Jenna Jameson, Dave Navarro and Marilyn Manson. But today he’s in Dublin to promote Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead, a collection of his most compelling interviews.
The book’s structure sets it apart from the usual journo’s retro-anthology. The interviews (a jaw-dropping cast-list that includes Bruce Springsteen, Brian Wilson, Eric Clapton, Courtney Love, Chuck Berry, Marilyn Manson, Tom Cruise, Madonna, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Mötley Crüe, the RZA, Trent Reznor, Chris Rock, Lady Gaga and many more) are linked by theme rather than a subject, a format that might best be described as a sort of literary channel-hopping, in which the great, the good, the bad and the ugly hold forth on life, death, sex, drugs, madness, art... and Scientology.
“All along I was collecting my favourite pieces in this folder on my computer called ‘Anthology’,” Strauss explains. “When Kurt Cobain committed suicide and I went out there (to Seattle) for two weeks for Rolling Stone and wrote that kind of definitive piece, that went in my anthology folder. Which was ironic because it’s not in the book, and that’s the one I’m proudest of. There’s another one, pre-Game, where I went undercover as a stand-up comic to get over my social anxiety. And after I did Emergency, which was two years of learning how to rebuild civilisation from scratch by myself, I thought, ‘Why don’t I take a break and tell my publisher I’ll have my anthology in two months?’ And so I went into my folder and started reading those pieces.”
And?
“And I thought if I put them in a book they just wouldn’t hold together. They were good in the format in which they were published, magazine or newspaper, but I don’t have the hubris to say that these are still intrinsically interesting as timeless art severed from the context. Is my frickin’ Madonna or Tom Cruise profile so good that years later you still want to read and talk about a movie that nobody cares about anymore?
“I also think you really have to assume that every book you write could be the first book somebody reads of yours: ‘Hey, this is this Strauss guy’s anthology, it must be his best stuff.’ Every book has to stand on its own. One of my philosophies of writing is I assume nobody’s interested, so I wrestled with all these different formats until I hit on this one: What’s the most compelling or unique or revelatory or bizarre or funny moment, the only thing I remember years later? I thought I’d collect all those moments and fuck the rest of the article.”
And, as Strauss indicates in the foreword, the constraints of newspaper or magazine publishing – everything from house style to legal concerns to editorial bias – often result in the best bits getting cut from the piece.
“Freed from what a magazine or a newspaper requires, the who-what-when-where-why, those moments are so much more compelling,” he says. “When I read two and a half pages of an artist here, I feel like I know their personality, I get them, versus when I wrote a 5,000 word magazine story, with so much filtering. It makes it hard to go back to journalism now.”
What did he learn about himself from interviewing all these extraordinary characters?
“The most interesting thing about putting this book together is it does compose a narrative of my own life, it really is a tacit autobiography of sorts. I can see the growth of this guy who’s super nervous talking to Led Zeppelin, or Genesis P. Orridge from Throbbing Gristle, who made fun of me through the whole interview, to interviewing Chuck Berry and hopefully having a meaningful exchange and trying to tell him some things that might help him to be happier. And I see the issues I’m struggling with. When I was young I was interested in sex and sexuality, so when I was interviewing Led Zeppelin I was asking a lot of questions about sex. Then family, love, those kind of themes.”
Does he consider himself an artist?
“I dunno. If I had to go deep inside and ask my heart, part of my programming says no because I write non-fiction, but I try to write it in a literary way, so I consider myself a writer or a storyteller. But my programme of what’s art says it’s gotta be fiction to be art. I’ve got a fiction book under contract, but I keep writing these non-fiction books because I keep thinking somebody’s gonna scoop me on a book, so I gotta get that book out there sooner. But on the other hand, anybody who’s a good crafts person, whether they’re a cook or a plumber, is an artist on some level.”
The most fascinating – and in a strange way, enigmatic – subject in the book is Bruce Springsteen. He may project an everyman image, but he’s the furthest thing from ordinary.
“I’ve interviewed him twice, and I want to interview him a third time, because, of everyone I’ve interviewed who’s at that level, he’s the only one that really felt grounded. I can’t describe him as anything else. If you call somebody humble that seems pretentious, like they’re pretending to be a normal person. But he just carries himself in a way that’s completely unaware. You feel that whether he’s onstage or offstage or with his family, he’s still that same guy. I’ve read the Dave Marsh books, but I’m so curious about his upbringing. I want to know what made him better. He’s a hard guy to penetrate. He’ll answer a question in such a thoughtful way, he’ll think in a circle and hit the answer and then stop and re-answer it three or four times. Somehow that can obfuscate what you’re trying to get at, although it’s not intentional.”
It sounds like a songwriter compulsively refining his ideas.
“Exactly. But to add a layer to the thesis you just stated: It’s true, he doesn’t appear to have a lot of damage, but I also think it’s not what’s happened to you, it’s how strongly you’re built.”

Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead is published by Canongate.