Roth's shirts always have a big caption like “MOTHER IS WRONG”


epub or mobi, with thanks to the original sharer

“This is a primitive country,” says Phil Spector. “I was at Shepheard’s, the discotheque, and these guys start saying these things. It’s unbelievable. These people are animals.” “What kind of things, Phil?” “I don’t know. They look at, you know, my hair—my wife and I are dancing, and, I mean, it’s unbelievable, I feel somebody yanking on my hair in the back. I turn around, and here’s this guy, a grown man, and he is saying these, unbelievable things to me. So I tell him, like this, ‘I’m going to tell you this one time, that’s all—don’t ever try that again.’ And the guy—it’s unbelievable—he shoves me with the heel of his hand and I go sprawling back into a table—” —Spector pauses— “—I mean, I’ve studied karate for years. I could literally kill a guy like that. You know? Size means nothing. A couple of these—” he cocks his elbow in the gloom and brings up the flat of his forearm—“but what am I going to do, start a fight every time I go out? Why should I even have to listen to anything from these animals? I find this country very condemning. I don’t have this kind of trouble in Europe. The people of America are just not born with culture.” 


“I had just come from Sacramento, and I wasn’t supposed to know anything. My car was wilder than anything around. One night this kid comes up with a roadster with no door handles. It looked real sharp, but he had to kick the door from the inside to open it. You should have seen the look on his face when he saw mine—I had the same thing, only with electric buttons.” The real action was the drag racing, which was quite, but quite, illegal. “We’d all be at the Piccadilly and guys would start challenging each other. A guy goes up to another guy’s car and looks it up and down like it has gangrene or something, and he says: ‘You wanna go?’ Or, if it was a real grudge match for some reason, he’d say, ‘You wanna go for pink slips?’ “Well, as soon as a few guys had challenged each other, everybody would ride out onto Sepulveda Boulevard  and the guys would start dragging, one car on one side of the center line, the other car on the other. Go a quarter of a mile. It was wild. Some nights there’d be a thousand kids lining the road to watch, boys and girls, all sitting on the sides of their cars with the lights shining across the highway. After a while the cops would come. Then you really saw something. Everybody jumped in their cars and took off, in every direction. Some guys would head right across a field. Of course, all our cars were so hopped up, the cops could never catch anybody.

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