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A Conversation with Taj Mahal (continued)
PM: Going back over your--God, your incredible discography reawakened my Taj Mahal interest. And I'm tracking down records I never knew about, and ordered your autobiography. What kind of experience did you find that to be, putting your long and colorful story in print?
TM: Well, a lot of it was to put the whole thing out there--the black eyes, the thumbs growing out of the side of your neck, the crooked right leg--and just be done with it. Because the point is, you try to put some perfect picture of the perfect guy out there, the next book is going to be somebody who's going to just fill it up with all of the things that you didn't put in yours. People are real. They do good on some parts of their lives, they don't do good on other parts of their lives. Or they're inconsistent. I mean, most of us are stumbling along until we finally get a light, and then maybe something that we're doing keeps us lit up in our heads, and something that we're doing don't keep us lit up in our heads.
So I let everybody have their voice, everybody that was connected to me. They had their own voices in there, so they're going to have to live with what they said at that moment, too, down the road. I figure that it's just what people think. What I realized is that everybody had a different point of view.
PM: It's like your approach to music, it's inclusive.
TM: Uh-huh, yeah, wide open.
PM: On your website, I really thought the top-ten lists were fun. It kind of cuts to the heart of the matter. And I noticed a couple of my favorite writers in there, Walter Mosely and Annie Proulx.
TM: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Good writers.
PM: Walter Mosely, I wondered, hey, he's an L.A. guy. He's basically a contemporary, more or less. Have you run into him personally?
TM: I haven't run into him personally, but I spoke to him once. He was on the White House lawn for Book Day or this National Book Week with the First Lady, Laura Bush.
PM: Wild.
TM: And they were on some C-Span thing, and they had a phone number. I never was able to ever get through to one of those lines, but I couldn't believe it, I actually got through and spoke to him. I identified myself, and we talked--because there was a character in one of his books named Mouse.
PM: Oh, yeah Mouse--he's the best.
TM: And the way Don Cheadle played Mouse in Devil in a Blue Dress, I thought that was a really great character. I had liked Mouse when I read about Mouse. And then the way he actually played out in the movie was really exciting for me. And then the deal was that I asked him was Mouse ever coming back. And he said, "Well, Mouse is never going to be resurrected as we know him, like all of a sudden he was out of the theme and then we're going to bring him back. But Mouse is going to come back in the form of a flashback." And so he did, in this other book that I read of recent--Walter Mosely's book that I read. So yeah, anything that comes out by him, I devour it. I mean, it's out, I got to have it.
PM: Yeah.
TM: I got to read it. I don't care if it's in hardback, I'm not a man to worry about it. I'm not waiting around. I'm going to read it because it's really exciting what this guy's writing.
PM: He's the best. I hope they try a couple more movies, because Devil in a Blue Dress, that was pretty good, but really the best part of it was Mouse.
TM: Yeah. Mouse is incredible. And then there's another guy, a British novelist, originally from St. Kitts or his parents were--where did I see that? Something I was just reading, they had an article about him. He sounded really good. Wait, here, I think I've got it.
PM: Is he on a Mosely kind of tip or--
TM: I think it's some of that, yes, but something different, because his thing is the Caribbean immigrants into the U.K. I haven't read any of his stuff yet, but I've read about him, and everybody is really excited about his work. His name is Caryl Phillips. He has a new book out, I think it's his seventh book. There's a website, www.carylphillips.com, you can find out more about him.
PM: I appreciate that. That's an amazing thing about the Internet, you can find out about anything. You hear about a writer and you can go to the guy's website.
TM: Uh-huh.
PM: Do you have any thoughts about how the net could influence our music scene?
TM: Oh yeah, I'm sure that's going to be great. That's one of the other stories that's in this--I think it's this week's Time Magazine. They're talking about what everybody's scared of with the Internet. Yeah, it's talking about it pretty intensely.
PM: It's the latest bugaboo.
TM: Well, not really. What it is, it's the same old same old. They were going to ignore it all, because they're the guys. They're the good ol' boy network, so they were going to ignore something that came right up in front of them. Well, I read yesterday, what they've done is they've Henry Morganed the guy who started Napster, now he's a consultant to some new company. Was it, I don't know, Roxio?
PM: Yeah, I just got an email about that.
TM: Yeah, come on, they couldn't fight the pirates down in the Caribbean, so what did they do? They took Henry Morgan, and they knighted him. I mean, this isn't new. The first thing they're going to say is, "No, because we're in control." They were in denial. But what they couldn't be in denial about was that every year it kept dropping five percent. The reason it's dropping is because they were cheating the people. One, two, three max good songs on a CD, and how much does it cost?
PM: Yeah.
TM: I just say, how many times does a kid have to see Behind the Music to realize that his favorite group is being ripped off by the suits. So what are kids are going to think? "Hey, you're ripping them off. We see how you ripped them off. You're ripping us off. You're charging us twenty dollars for a product that costs you thirty-five cents to make."
PM: "So we're going to rip you off."
TM: That's correct. continue
