Black-and-white footage from a 1971 interview.
JEUNE PRITCHARD:
Germaine, as an ex-groupie, do you feel qualified to talk about the rock culture?
GERMAINE GREER:
(Laughs) I don't know where you get the 'EX-groupie' from? I'd call myself a groupie, you know, because it's become a derogatory term that's used for any woman who hangs around the rock scene. And I've been involved in the rock scene for a long time… Not as long as I should've been. I was very resistant to it at first. I was sort of dropping pills and going to the Town Hall and listening to, you know, the St Matthew Passion. That was how I got my rocks off in those days. But then, all of a sudden, I just discovered what was going on. I think I began listening to the words and realised that what these kids were talking about was not what we used to talk about when I was wearing roped petticoats and going to the Mentone Town Hall dance, which was… The songs were all about situations that never existed, they were all about romantic situations. And the change of that was when the Beach Boys began using the sexual double entendre about women and cars, so you never knew quite what they were talking about when they sang their song. And I didn't listen to that and I didn't listen to the Beatles. I think probably the first song that I ever really listened to and realised it meant something in terms of the way we live was Satisfaction — I Can't Get No Satisfaction. I remember playing that on a jukebox in Italy somewhere and just realising that something was happening, something really strange. And I'd always been involved with musicians, you see, up to that point and always been a sort of a musician myself. So it was just a simple transference to get involved with rock musicians and to write about them and so on.
JEUNE PRITCHARD:
How encompassing is rock culture, then? Does it spread beyond the music into other fields?
GERMAINE GREER:
Uh… It'd be easy to exaggerate the extent to which it does spread beyond the music itself, because what happens is you get a situation like the Rolling Stones concert in Hyde Park where half the people had come to watch the other half responding to the rock'n'roll culture that was being laid down there. And what Mick wanted to do was hand out cheap tambourines to the audience and get them to join in and to sort of freak out and have a marvellous time. They didn't do that. They were all very listening. They were behaving as if rock'n'roll was jazz music, and they very often do this — they just listen. And the surprising thing was that that situation was regarded by many of us as potentially political. There was a quarter of a million kids there who could have walked off and occupied the city, you know, because it was empty, it was a Saturday afternoon. They could've just occupied the business nerve centre of London and thrown the country into chaos. But there was never the remotest suggestion that Mick Jagger would suggest to them that they do that or that they would take it into their heads to do that. And in fact the only corporate activity they indulged in was they all picked up their rubbish at the end and went home and went back to work. I think some bands, though, have a real connection with the life of the community that the Rolling Stones even didn't have. The Rolling Stones turned everybody on. Then you get bands who turn specific groups of people on in a specific way with regard to specific issues. One of the best examples of that is the MC5, who were involved in the ghetto riots in Detroit. They literally played the music while people set fire to the ghetto, and got extremely involved so that in fact they were persecuted wholeheartedly. And they also took political advertisements in the papers and charged them to Elektra Records and got sacked and things like that. And they were… didn't matter who came to Detroit, whoever played Detroit, the MC5 was always second on the bill and the MC5 always got much more support than the big-name visiting band because of their close relationship with the community. Now, The Who used to be like that. But nowadays, the Who — well, I don't know about right now — but they went through a very bad phase where… When they went to their old haunts to play to the kids they used to play for — the hard working-class kids, the sort of amphetamine kids, you know — they had the most terrible fights because the kids felt very specifically betrayed by that band, the way they would never feel betrayed by the Rolling Stones, who never belonged to them. And they threw pennies at the stage and bottles. And on one famous occasion they started hitting the Rolls Royce with pennies as it was driving away from the hall. And the chauffeur jumped out to kind of sort it out, and Keith was left hanging onto the wheel. And Keith can't drive, and had been playing all night anyway and just didn't know where he was. And he ran over him and killed him. And, you know, it's like that with The Who because they do have this connection with people. But most of the bands don't. Most of the bands, as you very well know, are hype bands — they belong to their record companies. They don't belong to the people at all. And this is getting more and more the case. If rock'n'roll is dead, it's because we sold it out. We ruined it, we threw it away.
JEUNE PRITCHARD:
It seems that a lot of kids have become rather disillusioned with someone like Jagger because they expected him, because he did certain things, to be a fairly radical person politically, and he isn't, really.
GERMAINE GREER:
Oh…
JEUNE PRITCHARD:
He had the power to do so much.
GERMAINE GREER:
Yes, he did and he never used it, that's true, but he never promised that he would. In some ways, his reaction is more typical of any working-class English boy's reaction — he got in the money and he behaved as if he was in the money. And he had a good time and he bought himself everything he could possibly want in the way of pleasures. He learned all the vices of the upper classes and practised them better than their original protagonists. And that's much more like what any working-class boy in England would think he'd do if he got into that kind of money. Somehow I find that less nauseating than the sort of phony revolutionary stuff you get from John Lennon, who thinks all he has to do is put on a worker's hard-hat and a singlet and stare grimly out of a photograph and talk about being a working-class hero and he's actually done something. In a way, I'm a bit unfair because John does give money to radical causes. John and Yoko have just given £400 to an advertisement in The Guardian against the imprisonment of Jake Prescott for 15 years on a hopelessly vague charge. But so does Mick, you see. When it comes to giving money, Mick's probably given more in a way. Mick is always giving money to new underground papers that lose everything. English Rolling Stone, I think, cost him a fortune. And he's… You are more likely to get wholehearted backing from Mick, but it's much harder to work out what you've got to do to get it. With John, you do know that the issue's got something to do with it. With Mick, it's very much a matter of whether he thinks you're for real or not. And that's intangible. That's how you wear your hat, you know.
JEUNE PRITCHARD:
Germaine, about communities, a lot of young people in this country particularly, and I'm sure in Europe and England, are sort of setting up communes, particularly up in the north of this country. How do you feel about that? Do you think this is going to be the answer, this alternate society?
GERMAINE GREER:
No, you might be able to consider them as sort of temporary liberated zones where people can develop a lifestyle which they can't live in in the whole community, the community at large. But I reckon… And very few of them are truly liberated, though they get harassed by the police. It's always assumed that drugs are being consumed. And the corporate ownership… I mean, community ownership of any kind is repulsive to the state we live in. I mean, white bicycles get smashed up by the police and thrown into the river and things like that because they can't bear to see them around. Well, the same thing goes for a commune — it just outrages their ideas of how you ought to live. Apart from the fact that communes have a lot of problems of their own. It's not easy to live in a commune with heads shaped the way ours are. So the kids have got all their internal problems and all the external problems. I, you know, I barrack for them, I wish them every success in the world, but I'm never surprised when they come back to town and say, 'Oh, I'm so glad I got off that commune!'
JEUNE PRITCHARD:
The role of women in this rock subculture, then, do you think it's any different to this thing in our community, do you think that women are more liberated, or do they still continue to play a fairly submissive role?
GERMAINE GREER:
Oh… there's no hard and fast rule about that. By and large, women in the rock culture are hopelessly oppressed and continue their own oppression hand over fist all the time, sort of plodding along behind the old man, barefoot, in a kaftan and six months pregnant. I've seen it millions of times. But there are individual cases where this is not so and individual bands who treat women in a different way. I think, um… Joe Cocker and Leon Russell are a bit different in their attitude towards freewheeling women. They don't treat them as spittoons or bags or any of that. Most of the sort of little ordinary bands fell for the common denigration of groupies and women who just hung around the bands and did their own thing. But the really good people, like The Band, for example, live in a community of fantastic women, most of whom are musicians, whom they encourage to play, and I'm just hoping that… Well, at one stage I was even hoping that maybe I could do an LP with them and these women, but that's not all that easy, partly because of time. And I would rather have the LP down and then sell it rather than sell the option to Ahmet Ertegun or anybody, which would bore me to tears. And I would like to have a really, truly band before I laid down anything — you know, to actually go round and play. I'm always bitterly disappointed that women's rock groups are so bad. Although there are rock groups coming up in the States — there's 10 or 12 of them, all women, who are trying to lay down a kind of heavy feminist rock that'll really turn people on. But it's nothing like the explosion of creativity that happened among the boys. You know, everybody had a guitar and the girls just somehow never picked them up. I don't know what it was. They sang a lot. And quite happy to get out in front and do a song-fest, you know. But Goldie and the Gingerbreads was a long time ago.
JEUNE PRITCHARD:
Do you think that really the rock culture can offer anything to the kids, though? You know, how positive are they about forming an alternate society?
GERMAINE GREER:
Oh, they're not positive at all. But the music has been terrifically important in helping them to have any notion of themselves as an alternate society. The music told a kind of truth that their parents didn't want to hear, and the kids were very conscious of that and they stuck to their music.