But Enough About Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

rang majestically over the mountains, exhorting us to follow him across the desert, as thirsty as you are.
    Pitt thrashed around.
    This has happened to me a couple of times, and I never know what to do. When someone is playing air guitar, do I play guitar as well? Whip my head around? Do I fill in on air drums? Pick up something and examine it? It’s the same situation as being in the studio with a band and they play you some new tracks from their upcoming release. They all stare at you expectantly. Do you bob your head? Do you close your eyes, presumably lost in the music? You can’t sing along, of course, because you never heard the words before. Maybe you give an OK sign and a big smile?
    As Pitt leaped around the trailer and continued to rock, I stood there helplessly. Do I yell, “This album is so great”? I fast-forwarded ahead: He can’t hear me, so he turns the stereo down, I idiotically repeat, “This album is so great,” he is annoyed because I have cut his moment of abandon short. I opt to go to the trailer door and take in the spectacular view of the peaks. I assume an awed, but slightly mellow, expression to match his low-key manner. After a few more songs, he joined me at the doorway to remark that he never got tired of the view. I, meanwhile, exhaled in relief. And because this wasn’t in Los Angeles, I was able to spend the entire day with him—hiking, eating lunch in the commissary, even watching Sling Blade in his trailer with him, just the two of us. It wasn’t necessarily that I was spectacular company, it’s just that the deep mud around the set had suspended the shoot, and he didn’t really have anything else to do.
    Sadly, most interviews do not have the option of taking place in the wilderness, but with a little ingenuity, even the most common of settings can work. Hotel rooms, for instance, are a music-world cliché, and not all that interesting unless they’re filled with used crack vials, but if your rendezvous takes place in a hotel, all is not necessarily lost.
    The San Antonio hotel room of Rolling Stones guitarist Ron Wood offered a perfect peek into his everyday life. He and the band were in the midst of a U.S. tour and I joined him during a night off. He opened the door to the coziest scene imaginable. Ron’s blond wife, Jo, was bustling around doing the laundry and throwing out the occasional wisecrack. Candles wereburning, scarves were draped over the lamps for a softer effect, and the TV was turned to an old interview with Katharine Hepburn (“Tough old broad!” Wood cackled appreciatively). My affable host, meanwhile, had set up a keg of Guinness beer in the bathtub of their suite and would periodically amble in there and fill ’er up. He urged me to join him, and he was so casual about it that after a while I unself-consciously headed to the bathroom to avail myself. As I filled my glass, I surveyed the surroundings. Draped over the shower curtain was a row of dripping black socks. Ron rinsed them out in the sink at night like an old British pensioner! This is a man who could have paid someone to lick them clean.
    When I returned to the living room, Ron showed me a large sketchpad full of artwork that he had done, flourished here and there with an occasional guest doodle by Mick. We spent a delightful evening paging through the book and drinking Guinness while he reminisced about the Stones’ early days, told stories about the band’s visits to the homes of Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino (whose wife wouldn’t allow him to stay in the house, he had to sleep in a shed in the garden), and talked proudly about his kids. He was one of the most unaffected people I’ve ever met. At the end of the night, he led me over to the balcony of his room and threw the doors open to a Texas sky that seemed impossibly huge. A few nights earlier, he told me, he and Jo had come out there and spent a long while watching a