The Lester Interview: Neal Karlen
Hello all!
Just a quick reminder that if you want bookstores to be there when the pandemic is over, please buy books from them (if you can). It may cost a few dollars more than Amazon, but it's an investment in the kind of place we want to live:
August Bookstore Sales Dropped 30.7%
Your Local Bookstore Wants You to Know That It’s Struggling
You can use Bookshop.org, IndieBound, or you can find a list of local stores at the old Lesters here and here.
News is sparse today, but we do have a great interview with Neal Karlen on his new book, This Thing Called Life, about his long friendship with Prince. (You can read an excerpt in Rolling Stone.)
Be well, and remember: Sometimes it snows in October.
Lester
News
Rain Taxi’s Twin Cities Book Festival is online here.
Congrats to Stephanie Pearson on her Silver Award for Lowell Thomas Travel Journalist of the Year, as well as two Gold Awards for stories!
The Lester Interview: Neal Karlen
Neal Karlen is a former staff writer at Newsweek and Rolling Stone, and a regular contributor to The New York Times. He is the author of eight other books ranging in topic from minor league baseball to linguistics to punk rock to fundamentalist religion. A graduate of Brown University, he lives in his hometown of Minneapolis. This Thing Called Life: Prince’s Odyssey On + Off the Record was published in October by St. Martin’s Press.
Lester: What were the origins of This Thing Called Life?
Neal Karlen: Well over half my lifetime ago—my GAWD, was I ever 25?—I was living in New York, working for Rolling Stone. Through a curious combination of kismet, good karma, and swell luck, I found myself being driven through North Minneapolis by Prince in a whalebone white 1966 Thunderbird, having been granted the first interview he’d given in three years, since before “Purple Rain.”
For a dozen years, for reasons I still don’t understand, I became the only reporter he gave in-depth interviews to. I wrote three Rolling Stone cover stories on him; scribbled up the story to a “rock video opera” that got the worst reviews of anything he ever did; and composed his last testament, his final statement to the world, which he told me would be buried under the grounds of Paisley Park, along with his will and the “Lovesymbol” album.
And then I quit. I still don’t know if I was brave or stupid, but I didn’t type his name for publication for 26 years. I quit writing about him, but I didn’t quit Prince, and we stayed in touch for all told 31 years, until three weeks before he died.
L: How did it come together? Did you have to go through old tapes?
NK: It almost didn’t. I’d quit writing about him a quarter-century earlier because it had become my entire identity, “Prince’s friend,” the only thing people would talk to me about. I was in danger, I thought, of becoming his “Bobo”—a baseball world slur for a professional sycophant to an established superstar.
I didn’t want to become the Bobo formerly known as Neal, but Nathanael West. I wanted to run away to other circuses and become what I pretentiously thought of as a “real” writer. I thought I could do that by escaping writing about rock, which is the proverbial high school with money, and where everything boils down to a binary equation of “that’s cool” or “that’s not cool.”
He died on April 21, 2016; there were a dozen book proposals floating around agents and publishers by April 22. I didn’t sign with St. Martin’s until July, not because I was above it all, but I wasn’t convinced until then I could write a real memoir/biography without being a phony.
Meantime, I couldn’t even listen to the mounds of tapes or look at the Everest-high pile of notes I had for a year. The tapes brought back ghosts—not just of him at 26, but me at 25. We were both so innocent, so sure everything would work out, that we would stay in love with the women we were with and live happily ever after.
Finally, a year after he died, I transferred my tapes to my laptop. Two weeks later my apartment and everything burned down while I was out to dinner (the fire department ruled it “an unintentional electrical malfunction.”) All I had were the clothes I was wearing and my laptop I was carrying in a backpack.
L: Was there anything that might surprise us about Prince that you uncovered about in working with him?
NK: A gazillion. The main thing though is that there was an actual human being, a guy inside that Rubik’s cube of personalities, personae, masks, and contradictions. A good guy, and it breaks my heart to say it—but he was the loneliest person I’ve ever met. He was broken by his father as a person; but that breakage also gave him the will to become what he became. I just wish he’d been happier.
L: When was it that you decided you wanted to be a writer?
NK: Never. I’m still not sure I’ve decided. I just kept writing. You’ve heard me talk and know how I can sound insane, because I jabber so fast, on six topics at once, and don’t bother to make transitions. In 7th grade I discovered I could make myself understood by writing things down. And while I busied myself through high school and college figuring out what I really wanted to be, I kept writing. After college I got a job at Newsweek, so I could keep trying to deduce what I should be when I grew up. Then I looked back, realized I’d been a grown-up for quite some time—and I was still writing. And honestly, I’m a completely incompetent person. I’m not being disingenuous, I can’t do anything. I shudder to think what would have become of me if one couldn’t make a living writing.
L: Who are some of the writers who influenced you?
NK: Well I mentioned Nathanael West, but dealing with others in the 20th century I’d say Joseph Heller, Saul Bellow, [F. Scott] Fitzgerald, Joseph Mitchell, James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf, the usual suspects. 19th century, how can one not be into the Russians, and British novelists who happened to be women?
L: What are the challenges of working in a place like Minnesota?
NK: I left Minnesota right after high school. When I came back at 30, the first problem was simply being perceived as an outsider. The week I was literally unpacking my clothes I made The Reader’s “Get Out of Town List.” People still come up to me and say “I’m surprised you’re not an ass----.” I’ll ask why, and they’ll say, “ya know, that whole living in New York/Rolling Stone/New York Times thing. It was as judgmental and mean and cliquey at first here as anything judgmental and mean and cliquey as I’d seen in literary New York.
Luckily, bowing and scraping is my natural state of being—I truly begin most sentences by apologizing. And when folks saw I had no ambitions beyond somehow getting through the day, Minnesota became home again. THEN, the problem was breaking through to literary New York. But luckily I had made enough contacts—and there were enough stories laying around here waiting for people to pick up—that I could make a living basically writing about what I wanted to living by my wits (or more accurately, half-wit.) I count myself as very, very lucky.
But there’s still that basic problem—one is perceived in New York as a “provincial” writer. Once a magazine editor in Manhattan called and asked if Minnesota was near Utah, where the story they wanted to cover was. I just said, “today I am.”
Still, I love it here. I’m a native Minnesotan. In New York I’d just be another shmuck with curly hair and a laptop. Here, I’m “other”—the Star Tribune once called me “a Minneapolis character” and I don’t think it was necessarily a compliment. Only in Minneapolis could I be considered even remotely funky.
L: What does it mean to you to be a Minnesota writer?
NK: I don’t know why, but the only group in Minnesota where I really felt like an outsider has, until recently, been amongst “Minnesota writers.” Maybe I was paranoid, or shy, but that whole passive-aggressive “Minnesota Nice” thing seemed to be true. Then, last year, that feeling went away and everyone has been swell. It must be me.
I think more about being a “writer” than a “Minnesota writer,” and mostly how it never seems to get easier. I don’t know if I’m deluding myself, but I seem to remember how joyful and carefree I felt writing in seventh grade, somehow making the six topics I was talking about at once, sans transitions, understandable!