On Aug. 25, 2026, arguably the greatest woman of all time, the universally adored Dolly Parton, died at age 80, leaving a hole in country music, pop culture, and our hearts that can never be filled. I only got to interview her once, via Zoom in 2022 when she was promoting her new line of delicious Duncan Hines cake mixes and frostings on a confectionary-pink, Lisa Frank-like set. But just seeing her laughing, smiling, and sharing her alternately touching and salacious life stories on my computer screen will forever remain one of my career highlights.

Parton was dressed for her interview in true Dolly style, although she joked that she looked slightly less glam than usual. “I’m normally not wearing aprons or stuff. I’m usually wearing my gaudy stuff with my boobs hanging out or whatever, but I didn’t wanna get icing on ‘em,” she told me. She even later joked about jumping out of a giant Duncan Hines pastry, musing, “That’d probably sell a lot of cakes!”

There was one thing Dolly said during our delightful chat, however, that I did not agree with: She humbly insisted, repeatedly, that she was not a “natural beauty,” explaining, “I have to work hard to look good. I like to look a certain way, but I honestly am not a natural beauty. I try hard to look as good as I can, because I have a certain way to. But I try to shine from the inside to make up for a lot of other stuff. But no. But that’s OK. I do all right.”

Dolly did more than all right. She was beautiful, inside and out. As tributes to this lovely lady come pouring in, I am sharing our thoroughly charming and fascinating lightning-round chat about the celebrities Parton baked for, that time Elvis Presley was supposed to record her hit “I Will Always Love You,” and the scary New York City street altercation that inspired her infamous “rooster to a hen” zinger in 9 to 5. It was a conversation that felt like a party from beginning to end, and I might eat some Dolly Parton Banana Pudding today in her honor. This interview was literally and figuratively very sweet. I will always love her.

LYNDSANITY: You’ve probably had all sorts of people at your table — who are some of the most famous people you’ve baked or cooked for?

DOLLY PARTON: Well, anybody that ever comes to my house that I’m starring with, whether it’s [Rhinestone co-star] Sylvester Stallone — who is more on a diet, he stays more on a diet. [Best Little Whorehouse in Texas co-star] Burt Reynolds always was happy to eat anything. I often cook for all the cast and crew when I’m doing a movie. Lily [Tomlin] and Jane [Fonda]… Jane at the time we did 9 to 5 was really heavy into her workout tapes and she wasn’t eating a lot of greasy, buttery stuff, but Lily grew up in the South, so she loved my cooking, and still does, if we get a chance to do it.

Did you ever bake for Elvis? Because I know that there’s a famous story that one time he was going to record “I Will Always Love You.” And I know he liked his Southern food!

No, I didn’t know Elvis. I never met him. I was going to meet him for the first time when he was coming to the studio to sing “I Will Always Love You” —  which didn’t work out, as you know, because Colonel Tom Parker, his manager, wanted half of the publishing. But anyway, I would’ve cooked for him if he’d have wanted me to. … But when he was going to do my song, I was gonna meet him and I’m sorry, I didn’t get to meet him.

Whitney Houston went on to cover that song, and it was quite lucrative for you. You’ve always been so business-savvy in your career. As cool as it may have been for Elvis to do that song, you must be grateful that you didn’t cut what probably was not a very lucrative deal with Colonel Parker.

No, it wasn’t. … “I Will Always Love You” I wrote when I had left The Port Wagoner Show. … But actually, that had been my first No. 1 hit, and it was the most important song in my catalog at that time. If it had been a new song, if I’d had just written something for [Elvis Presley], I might have reconsidered that. I’ve still always wanted him to sing it. I wrote a song later called “I Dreamed About Elvis” and it was about dreaming about Elvis singing that song. And I had an Elvis soundalike to come in and sing the Elvis part, and it sounds great! Maybe one day I’ll put that out.

It’s interesting, the story of you breaking professionally from Porter, who had been so instrumental to your early career. I saw you give this speech at MusiCares — you said you actually “never met a man you didn’t like,” and you also said, “I’ve never met a man whose ass I couldn’t kick if he didn’t treat me with respect.” How did you navigate things back then? It was very different time in the business.

Well, I happened to have six brothers, uncles, cousins, that I loved. I know of the nature of men. I love men, and I love my husband. So, I was never intimidated by men. And I tried to always kind of be pretty and sexy. I mean, I wasn’t a natural beauty, so the way I dressed was kind of provocative, and so I never took it as an insult — like, if men came onto me, I thought it was like a compliment! But I was not bringing that [energy] in. … I never slept with anybody I didn’t want to. I didn’t feel intimidated to have to, you know, whatever. But I was lucky. I loved men and knew how to talk to men. I also knew how to express myself. Hey now, like I said, if I wanted to [be intimate with someone], that’s different! But nobody ever made me or forced me to do it.

I would always say, “You gotta look like a woman and think like a man.” And I really feel like I do that. I have a new song called “Woman Up and Take It Like a Man.” Like, if you want to be strong, if you wanna be all that, you gotta kind of walk the walk and talk the talk, so to speak. There were some times that I was made to feel very uneasy, but I also knew that I was going get out of that — because I have a pretty good knee, too!

Did you actually ever do that? Do you have any stories? It doesn’t have to be a story that involves a knee [to the groin], but stories where you were in a weird place, not being respected or whatever, where you took a stand and came out of it?

Yes, but it wasn’t in Nashville. It was in my early days. My friend Judy and I’d never been to New York and I wanted to go. … We went down, walking down the street and we were looking around at all this stuff… and this guy came up and he started trying to put the make on me and saying all this stuff. And I was saying, “No, now, get away! We’re not interested. We’re just out walking.” And he kept trying. And at that time my daddy had given me a gun when I left home, and he said, “You use it if you have to — but only if you have to. But it’ll help you. If somebody knows you got a gun, they’re gonna leave you alone.” So anyway, this guy would not stop. … I said, “If you touch me” — and I was really angry and scared — I said, “If you touch me one more time, I’m gonna shoot your, you know, crotch off!” That’s kind of where that the [9 to 5] movie [line] came from, that “I’m gonna change it from a rooster to a hen” thing. Well, that actually happened me. And I said, “I’m gonna shoot it off!”

Anyway, Judy thought that was so funny. She started laughing, and I was so mad at her that I turned around and I said, “I’m gonna shoot you too! Why are you laughing? This is serious!” Well, about that time, she just thought that was so funny. We were both scared, though. But a guy came up to me and he knew who I was. He said, “Are you girls lost?” I said, “Yes, we are.” We didn’t know how to get back to our hotel. We wound up… is it 52nd Street? Or one of those where the whores run in pairs. We didn’t know that. And we did look the part, ’cause we both were, you know, country and tacky! … And so, he took us back to the Americana [Hotel] and sure enough, they had locked us out of our room. They thought we were trash, and because we had one room, they thought we were turning tricks in our room! They had put all of our stuff out in the hall and had locked the door. So, we had to go to the airport, get a cab and go to the airport, and wait for hours till we could get back home. And I thought, “I’m never going back to New York again!” But anyway, you have your stories, you live your life. And then you have memories and they make fun stories.

You have many fun stories! I want to ask something to pick up on something you said earlier: Do you really think you are not a natural beauty? Because I would beg to differ, as would many fans of yours.

Well, I’m telling you, I’m not! I’ve seen me before you do! I am not a natural beauty. I have to work hard to look good. I like to look a certain way, but I honestly am not a natural beauty. I try hard to look as good as I can, because I have a certain way to. But I try to shine from the inside to make up for a lot of other stuff. But no. But that’s OK. I do all right.

Obviously, you’re doing quite all right! But did anyone ever advise you that your image would hinder you, like it would prevent you from getting respect?

In the early days, a lot of people tried to tell me that. But I didn’t listen. And I’m still not listening when it comes to people trying to tell me what to do.

Click here to read the Q&A, and watch video of the full conversation below!

On Aug. 30, East Hollywood pop/punk teen trio LED are playing the inaugural CAMP — The Next Gen Fest, a festival at Los Angeles’s Underground Museum featuring rock stars of tomorrow like Kim Theory and Japanese viral drumming prodigy Yoyoka. But LED’s wholesome origin story actually plays out a like a real-life version of Camp Rock.

“It was a film camp that we did two summers ago, in 2024,” singer/guitarist Edie Yvonne recalled, during an LPTV interview right before one of LED’s first public gigs at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records last year. At that camp, Yvonne and future LED drummer Lockett Pentz portrayed casino gamers, while singer/guitarist Layne Brisbois (aka Layne Olivia) was cast as an assassin, in an amateur action/mystery caper. And while that short film, The Chain Gang, didn’t even go straight to video — “I don’t even think the movie’s out!” Brisbois laughed — it was a “fun bonding experience.” But more importantly, the song they wrote for the end credits, “Lies All Lies,” became LED’s debut single. And then LED became a real band.

“I actually didn’t think that we would become a band out of it,” admitted Yvonne, who is also an actress (her non-Chain Gang credits include Kitty, Chloe Sevginy’s directorial debut) and had attended the Shanelle Gray Studios Movie Camp to study acting. “I thought it would just be a one-time song. But I was secretly hoping that they’d want to keep collaborating, so I was really happy when we all got together and kept writing.”

Technically, if The Chain Gang even got a brief theatrical release, “Lies All Lies” — named after an Austin Powers catchphrase that Pentz used to randomly shout around the house at age 5, and eventually became his impromptu background vocals on LED’s debut recording — would qualify to be nominated at the Academy Awards for Best Original Song. “Oh, but they had a little mini-Oscars thing [at the camp],” laughed Brisbois. “They would hand out little Oscars.”

“And everyone got Best Something,” Pentz chuckled. “I think I won Best Shoe Game.”

LED at Licorice Pizza Records, Oct. 11, 2025

It makes perfect sense that Pentz had style from a young age, since his father is fashionable superstar DJ/producer Diplo. Pentz and Brisbois have played together in various kiddy bands since they we were age 10, and their first show actually took place about five years ago at one of Diplo’s Halloween house parties. It was on that fateful night that Diplo’s wardrobe malfunction, which nearly sabotaged that living-room gig, ironically might have predicted Pentz’s future band’s name.

“My dad’s LED mask got caught in the speaker, and it was messing with the sound. Everything sounded super-terrible-loud,” Pentz recalled.

“And then everyone thought it was the fire alarm!” laughs Brisbois. “They’re like, ‘What is that? What is happening?’’”

“And we’re like, ‘Oh, it’s your mask. It keeps touching the wires,’” said Pentz.

Pentz acknowledged, “My dad has probably influenced me a lot. … . He’s taken me to some of his shows. I’ve seen him perform. It’s not really my style, but I feel like that really made me think, ‘Oh, I want to be like him and make music.” However, while Pentz has been “kind of learning how to DJ and do tech music” and likes to “dabble in everything,” as he figured out his own musical identity, he and his LED bandmates, who are now all around the ages of 16 and 17, gravitated towards alt-rock.

Pentz said he’s “more of a rock kind of guy” whose drumming style is influenced by the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Green Day; Brisbois, who honed her guitar skills during the COVID-19 pandemic, cited Bring Me the Horizon as her favorite band; and Yvonne, who started writing songs during COVID lockdown, loves ‘90s-era indie-pop.

“I feel like a lot of teens our age are really into the ’90s and crave that era or that nostalgia, and maybe don’t resonate with some more modern music,” Yvonne told LPTV.

“In my personal opinion, today’s music doesn’t have that same feel. It’s kind of like, ‘I put this together quickly,’ in a way,” muses Pentz. “With older music, you can feel the work and time put into it.”

“I think the answer [to why teens love classic rock and alternative rock] is because rock is freakin’ amazing, but that’s just my opinion,” Brisbois stated bluntly.

An experience involving a famous ‘90s band, and Diplo, actually inspired “Goodbye Eric,” the second song LED ever wrote. [DJ Eric Hamilton] is one of my dad’s friends,” Pentz revealed. “The story is we went to a Limp Bizkit concert, and he went into the moshpit and we were like, ‘Ohhhh, he’s not coming back! That moshpit is crazy!… Goodbye, Eric. You made it this far. You’re gone.”

“He was gone for 30 minutes!” Brisbois chuckled. [Editor’s note: Hamilton made it out of the pit unscathed. He’s OK!]

Yvonne enjoyed an especially magical moment with two ‘90s rock icons, which set her on her own creative path. In 2018, at the third annual Girlschool festival — the same L.A. fest where another local teen band, the Linda Lindas, made their live debut, and where Garbage’s Shirley Manson was joined by surprise guest Fiona Apple for duet of “You Don’t Own Me” — Yvonne sang in front of a rock audience for the first time. Much like the Next Gen Festival, the Girlschool event was a perfect example of the importance of mentoring young talent.

“It was such an amazing experience,” Yvonne reminisced. “Anna [Bulbrook, founder of the Girlschool organization and a violinist who has played with Beyoncé, the Airborne Toxic Event, and Edward Sharpe] put a group of teens or kids together, including the Linda Lindas. I had never really performed on a stage like that; I came from more of a musical theater background at the time. I got to cover ‘Fade Into You’ by Mazzy Starr, and that was really when I knew I really wanted to do music.”

Along with their Licorice Pizza Records in-store showcase, LED have since played the Whisky a Go-Go, Aviator Nation, and the Hotel Café — “the more we get up there, the more comfortable we get, so we’re trying to play as much as possible,” Yvonne explained — but they confessed that their most daunting gigs, even more daunting than being on the same bill as Shirley Manson and Fiona Apple, have been on L.A.’s battle-of-the-bands circuit, which is “really huge” among local teens.

“I think we’ve done two so far,” Yvonne said. “I feel like those are actually our hardest performances, because there are some really heavy metal bands and it can be very intimidating! There’s a lot of moshing! It encourages me to play better, which always makes me nervous.”

LED did not win those two battles, but they’re clearly winning at life; maybe an Oscar (or Grammy) really is in their future. In the meantime, you can catch LED, plus a solo set by Edie Yvonne and many other future stars, at CAMP — The Next Gen Fest, on Sunday, Aug. 30. Tickets, full lineup, and other details can be found here.

photo: Reuben Cox

Singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and three-time Grammy nominee Andrew Bird wasn’t even familiar with HBO Max’s gritty medical drama The Pitt when the show’s composter, Gavin Brivik, cold-called him with an invitation to collaborate on a song for one of the series’ most heartbreaking and gut-punching moments. But once Bird watched the show — particularly an early version of that scene, in which fan-favorite character Louie Cloverfield, the lovable alcoholic with a heart of gold, dies with only the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center staff by his side — his lyrics for “Need Someone” came quickly.

“I’ve done this before where I’m asked to write a song for a show, and more than half the times I’ll take the song back. I won’t give it to them, because I write the songs as if they’re my own songs, and so I feel a certain ownership over them,” Bird confesses. “I’ve got to really think about it before I hand it over. But with this one, I knew for sure that this was it. It takes everything you’ve learned over a whole lifetime to sit down and write a song in an hour. … I absolutely wrote [“Need Someone”] for that scene. Every word.”

Bird was partially inspired by the 2020 pandemic — not just society’s shared post-COVID trauma, but the lack of appreciation of healthcare workers, whose harrowing experiences are depicted in The Pitt with an unflinching accuracy never quite captured in past hit hospital dramas like ER (which featured The Pitt’s star and co-executive producer, Noah Wyle) or Grey’s Anatomy. And while Bird has a long list of screen-composing credits, including The Muppets and Baskets, it was writing for The Pitt — which leads this year’s Emmy Awards with 25 nominations, including Original Music and Lyrics for “Need Someone,” which is Bird’s first Emmy nod — that gave him a true appreciation for television as an art form and a force for good.

“I really didn’t realize, until I started watching [The Pitt] and got involved, what an important show it is. Honestly, growing up watching TV as a kid, just it being ubiquitous in childhood as a sort of mind-numbing thing, I never thought TV was important,” Bird admits. “I don’t even have a TV in my house now, and once I became an artist, it wasn’t interesting to me. So, it was like, ‘Oh wow, this can really do a lot, almost more than any other medium, to help us figure out what the hell just happened [during the COVID-19 pandemic].’ To think of TV as being healing and important to a culture wasn’t something I’d really thought about until this came along. I quickly realized what an important show it was, and I really put everything I had into this.”

Bird is currently focused on an orchestral tour celebrating the 20th anniversary of his landmark album The Mysterious Production of Eggs, and is working on a new studio album due in 2027. But he also has nine songs on the soundtrack for I Play Rocky (Peter Farrelly’s upcoming biopic about Sylvester Stallone’s making of Rocky), so there may be more Grammy nominations, or even an Oscar nomination, in his future. He also doesn’t rule out acting again (after making his acting debut in Fargo Season 4), if the right role comes along. In the meantime, he chats here with Gold Derby about his once-in-a-lifetime experience with The Pitt.

LYNDSANITY: First of all, congratulations on your very first Emmy nomination! I imagine you’re very excited.

ANDREW BIRD: Thanks! I was told that we had a pretty good chance, given The Pitt‘s profile… but I’m not one who’s usually on the Grammy or Emmy circuit, probably because of genre being kind of elusive in what I do. So, [award nominations have] never really been on my mind much. I was really happy.

Well, you mentioned that the show has a high profile, with a rabid and invested fanbase. Were you a fan of The Pitt before you were enlisted for “Need Someone”?

No, I wasn’t at all. I was aware of it, but I just thought it was another medical drama in the style of ER or Grey’s Anatomy, which never really piqued my interest. This was kind of a cold call from Gavin. But I’ve always said that I enjoy doing song for picture, like lyrics for picture. I like the challenge of it; it uses everything I’ve got to offer, I think even more so than instrumental score. And so, I quickly binged Season 1, and it all happened. When these things come to me, I jump on them right away. If I want to do it, I get excited about it. I have to do it right away. Everything has to go to the side. It’s first idea, best idea, kind of knee-jerk and really fast. I think what helps is I embrace ambiguity in my lyrics sometimes, so that’s good for picture.

I wanted to reflect what was happening with the characters in the show, but you have two verses and a chorus to do that, so you get to decide how explicit you want to be. But I had little references to things, like Dana getting assaulted and “absorbing all the blows.” All these little things are kind of dropped in there, but it’s not explaining what’s happening in the scene exactly. It was written very fast. The binging, the writing, it was all very new to me. And plus, I’m getting the scene out of context — it’s episode 6 and they’re all standing around Louie, and that’s the first thing I see. When Noah drops that line about Louie losing his family and everyone kind of looks at the floor like, “Oh, shit,” I had to get more context to write a song for that, because I wasn’t exactly sure what everyone was feeling.

There’s a small but especially tearjerking detail when Emma grabs Louie’s hand, right as Dr. Robby is telling them about how Louie had lost his eight-months-pregnant wife and their unborn child in a car accident years ago. Apparently hospitals leave a deceased patient’s hand out from under the blanket so that a loved one at the bedside can hold it, but Louie only has the hospital staff, who’ve sort of become his honorary family, with him when dies. This goes perfectly with your lyric about how “you need someone who is gonna cry for you.”

Yes, I absolutely wrote it for that scene. Every word. The scene made me think about is how a lot of times, the last people that someone sees before they die are healthcare workers. And often at end-of-life care, that’s who’s really there for them. We don’t like to think about it very often, but what’s more fundamental than the fear of dying alone? That’s where the chorus came to me. Also, this show does not stop until this moment. There are not very many reflective moments; it’s so frenetic and there’s so much multitasking going on. And that’s the point: that everyone stops for a second to reflect on what they’re all doing. I didn’t realize at first, until this job came up, that the show was actually a reaction to ER and trying to set the record straight or correct things that were traumatized for entertainment value. Noah [Wyle] built his career with those type of shows, but he felt he wanted to capture a more reality-based experience with this show. I guess maybe it was weighing on his conscience a little bit.

I understand the COVID-19 pandemic was weighing on your mind when you wrote “Need Someone.”

Yes, the backstory has hints at the pandemic and the mental health and struggles of healthcare workers. I mean, that’s all still not dealt with; we as people have swept it under the rug, and there’s collective amnesia about it. … I’d have conversations fairly often with people that say COVID wasn’t that big a deal. And I’m like, “You do realize there were refrigerator trucks full of bodies, because the ERs were overflowing? And that emergency room doctors were committing suicide?” And they think I’m being hysterical or something. It’s like, wow, man, it wasn’t that long ago. Maybe they weren’t paying attention, but geez. And yeah, the show deals with a lot of things we don’t want to look at. A lot of people actually avoid the show simply because they’re too squeamish. But on a bigger-picture level with this stuff, end of life, people don’t want to talk about that and the pandemic. It’s kind of remarkable.

photo: Heather Gildroy

I understand you and Gavin collaborated on “Need Someone” by exchanging voice memos.

Yes, he had a template for the end credits, which is where most of the music you hear in the show is, and there were five or six things he sent me and I chose. It was just guitar, bass, and drums. I learned the chords and just started with that. He brought me the opportunity, so I felt an obligation to use his template. I came up with the lyrics and the melody and the chorus within about an hour of choosing that template, and then recorded that and sent it back to him. And then he had to pitch it up the chain. This was Gavin’s idea; it wasn’t the showrunners’. Apparently they were wary of songwriting — understandably, because they’re going for a reality thing. They don’t want to push people’s buttons any more than they already are with music; it might feel somewhat intrusive. But he had no problem getting the showrunners to like it. They watched [the song paired] with the scene and cried. But then we had to go up the whole executive ladder. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that it would go [in the scene]. But there was no, “Hey, maybe it could be a little more like this….” There were no notes, really; it was just as-is. And I’ve done enough score work to know that that is extremely rare.

This is interesting, because you mentioned ER and Grey’s Anatomy, and Grey’s Anatomy was one of the first big network TV shows to have syncs that really boosted bands’ careers and turned songs into hits, like with the Fray, Brandi Carlile, and Snow Patrol. After that, the floodgates opened. All the record labels and publishers were pitching the studios, and every artist wanted to get a placement in a hit show. But since The Pitt was always intended to be more documentary-style, there’s hardly any music in it all. So, to have your song in The Pitt, especially in such a key scene, must have been a real honor for you.

For sure, especially when I realized how important the show is. I’ve done this before where I’m asked to write a song for a show, and more than half the times I’ll take the song back. I won’t give it to them, because I write the songs as if they’re my own songs, and so I feel a certain ownership over them. … “Cracking Codes” was written for a kids’ show, and the show wasn’t very good. It was fine. I don’t think anyone remembers the show. I don’t even remember what it was called; it was kind of a Malcolm in the Middle-type of show. I feel like I’ve got to really think about it before I hand [a song] over. But with this one, I knew for sure that this was it. It takes everything you’ve learned over a whole lifetime to sit down and write a song in an hour.

You says that when the showrunners saw the scene with “Need Someone,” they cried. How did you react when you saw the finished scene?

I didn’t cry. … I guess sometimes I’ll do score work and I’ll get the script first, read the script, and even if I don’t end up doing the score, if I’ve read the script and I go to the theater and I see it, I can’t be moved at all by it. Anything where I know the structure of it or the outline of it, it’s really hard to be affected by it. Something about being privy to the writing mindset of it really turns you off to the emotions of it. … But there have been other parts of the show that have caused me to well up, like the young mother with terminal cancer. That’s a really painful one. The show has moved me in a lot of moments.

I mentioned that The Pitt has this very intense fandom. What feedback have you gotten from Pitt fans about “Need Someone”?

It was all very positive and effusive, except the only negative thing was that they wished it was longer! So, I wrote a bridge, because we were going to release the song and it was pretty damn short, a minute and change. I felt as a standalone piece, it didn’t really go anywhere to justify coming back to the chorus; you’ve got to have another bridge to take you away from something, in order to come back to it. So, I wrote this bridge about “sometimes you feel like someone is testing us, and you wonder how much you can take.” And then we rerecorded the song with my band, and that’s what’s out there now.

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Have you performed “Need Someone” at a public gig yet?

I’ve been doing it at [Los Angeles nightclub and theater] Largo, and we’ve been talking about tacking it onto these orchestra shows I’m doing. … Ernest Harden Jr. [the actor who portrayed Louie Cloverfield on The Pitt, and is nominated for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series at this year’s Emmys] actually came to a show at Largo, where I did a benefit for healthcare workers’ mental health. It was amazing.

How did he react to seeing you play the song live?

I mean, I did a song for his death; it was kind of intense! But he just said, “You’re so talented,” and he was so sweet and just so delightful. He’s loving every minute of this whole ride. He’s been a character actor, like smaller roles, for most of his career, and here he is on this run right now. It’s awesome to see how much he’s enjoying it.

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I hope you are enjoying this run as well! Before I let you go, I know you’ve been on the other side of the television camera: You played funeral director Thurman Smutny on Fargo a few years ago. How did that come about? Wasn’t that character written specifically for you?

Yeah, [show creator Noah Hawley] cast me on the spot after seeing me play in Austin. Backstage, he said, “Do you want to play this character in Fargo?” And I said, “How do you know I can do it?” And he said, “You can do it.” But it was nerve-wracking, because I’d never really given any thought to acting. I’m friends with John C. Reilly, so I thought, “I’ll ask him, ‘How do you act?’” John said, “Don’t underestimate the power of editing.” And that was it. I don’t know what I expected him to say. How can you replace years of coming up through Chicago theater, working on your craft, to me just coming in cold? It got me really thinking about actors who want to be musicians and musicians that who to be actors, and the human-nature impulse to be binary about these things.

Like, when I was on set, one of the first people I met was [Fargo actress] Jessie Buckley. I didn’t know of her at all at the time, and the first thing we talked about is music and how she’s a musician. So, then I see her act and I’m like, “Oh, she must just have this savant ability, to [also] be an amazing actor!” Just because my first impression was “she’s a musician,” so I’d categorized her as that. I still to this day think, “How does Jessie do that, when she’s a musician?” It was a whole exercise in how we have a bias about these things. Why shouldn’t you be able to do both extremely well?

It’s been my observation that there are more musicians who can act well than the other way around.

It depends. Like, in certain songs the ’50s and ’60s, the singer would start reciting something, like an Elvis kind of thing or an old country tune where they start talking instead of singing. Those are moments where you can tell if that performer can act or inhabit a character. Something gets triggered when you do that, a switch gets flipped. I’ve got certain songs that have a theatrical element, where I have to inhabit something and recite something to the audience in an off-the-cuff sort of way. But I tried really hard to learn my [Fargo] lines as if they were lyrics, trying anything to stay within my comfort zone. It wasn’t a tough role to play; it was a pretty narrow range of emotions that Thurman had, by design. That’s why [Hawley] knew I could do it. There was no “why hath you forsaken me,” crying-in-the-rain kind of moment. Thurman was a pretty buttoned-up, nervous man, which was what I was! … I definitely had imposter syndrome and I was a nervous wreck, but by the last episode I was like, “OK, I get it. Put me in, coach.”

So, did Fargo give you the acting bug? Is there more acting in your future?

I’d like to do it again, but the only offers I’ve gotten have been horror movies. And I don’t think that’s really going to be me.

This interview, which has been edited for brevity and clarity, originally ran on Gold Derby.

On Aug. 15, I had the honor of hosting a Q&A following a sold-out, star-studded screening of Tyler Measom and Craig A. Williams’s If These Walls Could Rock, a new documentary about infamous Hollywood hideaway the Sunset Marquis hotel. The directors and I were joined by surprise guest Mark Rosenthal (the hotel’s president and son of Marquis founder George Rosenthal) and special guest Sharon Osbourne. The Osbournes were frequent guests at the Sunset Marquis (the only Los Angeles hotel that wouldn’t kick out Ozzy Osbourne), and the rock ‘n’ roll family used to set up camp at this home-away-from-home for months at a time. Sharon and her daughter Kelly (who confesses in the film that she had her first drink, first kiss, and first line of cocaine at the Marquis) were two of the first celebrities who agreed to appear in If These Walls Could Rock, before Morrissey, Dave Grohl, Bruce Springsteen, Heart’s Nancy Wilson, Michael Des Barres, and many other rock A-listers eventually signed on.

Surprisingly, Sharon had not yet seen the film, experiencing it for the first time along with everyone else in Hollywood’s Landmark Sunset Theater, and she was visibly moved after the screening as she gushed about the importance of preserving old Hollywood and its struggling entertainment industry. And she, along with Mark Rosenthal, shared some sweet family memories of the hotel. But of course, Sharon Osbourne being Sharon Osbourne, she also blurted some wild remarks, one of which expectedly went viral before at least one of the attending iPhone-wielding fans had even exited the theater.

Watch the full, fan-shot Q&A in the video player above, and the offical movie trailer below. If These Walls Could Rock is now available to stream on Apple and Amazon.

On Aug. 12, National Vinyl Record Day (the anniversary of Thomas Edison inventing the phonograph in 1877), Good Day L.A. chatted live with me from the last standing Licorice Pizza Records, where I talked about the history of the store and why vinyl is still going strong after almost 150 years.

photo: Rosie Cohe

With a surname like Womack, sibling soul trio the Womack Sisters (nieces of Bobby Womack, granddaughters of Sam Cooke, and daughters of Cecil Womack and Linda Womack, aka Womack & Womack) seemed destined to go into the family business. “It felt natural to us, like a natural progression. We really couldn’t think of doing anything else,” says youngest sister Kucha.

But it wasn’t until they broke away from their parents and moved to L.A. —  where they worked for Uber (a side hustle that inspire their new track “Chauffeur”), a cleaning company, and a marijuana dispensary, while refining their old-school-meets-new-school signature sound that draws from classic girl groups ranging from TLC to the Marvelettes — that the Womack Sisters were truly able to make a name for themselves.

The sisters admit that, growing up with other four siblings, they didn’t fully appreciate their parents’ globe-trotting, jet-setting, rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, which had the family shuttling every two years between Thailand, London, Paris, Switzerland, Amsterdam, Jamaica, Johannesburg, Hong Kong, the Bahamas, and even a Nigerian village for a while.

“We didn’t know it was so amazing until we got older and realized that traveling is expensive!” eldest sister BG chuckles. “Growing up on tour and with all the exploration of the world our parents they did, we were like the Wild Thornberrys. But when we got to a certain age, our teens, we saw all our favorite high school movies and were like, ‘Oh my God, high school looks so much fun! A group of friends that are not related to us? Boys? You’re robbing us of this experience!’ … But our parents really wanted to influence us, and let us know that sometimes your family is the only thing you’ve got at the end of the day. They told us: ‘You’re going to make friends, but there’s nobody like your family.’”

“That’s definitely the reason why we’re as close as we are,” Kucha reflects. “There were seven of us, and we were homeschooled, so it was just us. We all were each other’s best friends.”

“Our dad was Peter Pan. He wanted to give us the biggest adventures ever,” recalls middle sister Zeimani. “But by our mid-teens that we were like,  ‘We can’t take it anymore! You’re traveling too much!’ And we relocated to Los Angeles. We wanted to know what life was really like. We wanted to get our feet wet, find relationships — be it friends, or being in love for the first time. And we were able to do those things when we kind of separated ourselves from them and their schedule, because our dad didn’t stop moving until he passed [in 2013]. Traveling was a joy for him, and we respected that. But we needed to find ourselves. And that affected our writing. I feel like we wrote songs [before moving to L.A.] from other people’s experiences, like what we saw in movies. But when you get out there and you have your first heartbreak, that’s a different kind of inspiration.”

It was only later in life that the sisters could understand (and relate to) a big reason why their parents had wanted to spend so much time overseas — that Womack & Womack had sometimes struggled to connect with Stateside audiences and record labels. “The [American music industry ] had its boxes that it put people in. The minute our parents got outside [the U.S.], they were like, ‘Oh, we could be whatever we want here!’” BG explains.

“I feel with the European market, and especially with the U.K., their love for soul music is out of this world. I mean, they appreciate rap and stuff like that, but they really love soul music, and their appreciation for it is the reason why even our grandfather had such great success,” adds Zeimani. “That’s really what draw them out there. The time they grew up in was an interesting time being Black. There’s a lot of racism when it comes to the’ 60s and the ‘50s. I think my parents going to Europe and seeing, ‘Wow, nobody’s really upset about skin color out here; everybody’s kind of just loving life and loving each other!’ — I think that’s what really made them say, ‘You know what? This is our new home. We’re going to stay in Europe and raise our kids out here.’”

Embed from Getty Images

Embed from Getty Images

The Womack Sisters’ nomadic upbringing might have been unorthodox, but wherever they temporarily called home, Cecil and Linda always put family first. “Our parents were very much about family and being together. They took us everywhere with them. You knew when we were coming!” says Kucha. However, even by the ‘80s, when Womack & Womack were recording for Elektra and Island, this was still mostly frowned upon in the industry.

“The pregnancy thing was a big problem. Our mother was pregnant all the time!” laughs BG. “She was pregnant on every album cover!”

“To be a husband-and-wife team, bringing their family to award shows and stuff, that was rare at that time,” says Zeimani, who was actually photographed as a baby for the cover of Womack & Womack’s 1988 album, Conscience. “They got a lot of backlash, and weren’t as supported by their label.”

As difficult as it sometimes was, personally and professorially, the unique international and independent trail that Womack & Womack blazed in the music business would ultimately set an example for their daughters —  who would later have to fight for their own artistic vision, as they carved out their own career in Los Angeles.

photo: Rosie Cohe

“Our parents experienced a lot of rejection of their music,” BG points out. “They were surprised to learn that all of their favorite songs were not considered hits —  until they put their own money behind it and forced it out. Once you get big, label don’t start saying everything you do is great. No. They say, ‘You’re not commercial.’ That’s what they tell you.”

“By the time our parents had Womack & Womack, our dad had already had several hits,” notes Kucha, referring to Cecil’s songwriting credits like Teddy Pendergrass’s “Love TKO,” the O’Jays’ “I Just Want To Satisfy You,” Patti LaBelle’s “Love Symphony,” the Four Tops’ “Your Song,” and “New Day” by George Benson. “So, you’d think you could trust him maybe a little bit! But they didn’t. [Music executives] were like, ‘That’s not a hit.’ But our dad knew ‘Teardrops’ [Womack & Womack’s 1988 international smash, which made the top five in nine countries] was a hit. So, he said, ‘I’m going to pay for it with my own money.’”

The tight-knit, insular Womack family turned out to be the perfect environment for BG, Zeimani, and Kucha to learn their craft. “We sat in the studio every hour; our dad would bounce all of his songs off of us before he put them out. He thought we had ‘new ears,’ as he would say, so he believed in prodigies,” BG remembers fondly. “If you put a prodigy in a certain environment around other really, really great musicians, they’ll just soak it up. And that’s kind of what they let us do. They never let us have any vocal lessons when we were coming up, because they wanted us to figure out how we wanted to sound for ourselves. But we were allowed to listen, and take things in, and watch.”

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And just as importantly, Cecil and Linda taught their daughters the ins and outs of the tricky industry. “They taught us about the music business more than anything, because if you’re not on top of the business side of it, you can sound as good as you want, you can look as good as you want, but it won’t make a bit of difference,” says BG. “No one will probably ever hear you.”

By 1993, the sisters were making their recording debut on Womack & Womack’s sixth studio album, Transformation to the House of Zekkariyas, but a real turning point in these prodigies’ career — and one of their biggest educational experiences — was when they had the honor of performing background vocals on their legendary uncle Bobby’s final tour.

“We had made this little Christmas CD for the family and we sent it to our grandmother, and he hit us up and was like, ‘You guys gotta fly out here right now. I’m going to manage you,’” BG grins. “He was so proud of us: ‘I can’t believe that you’re my nieces!’ He was just loving the fact that we connected to music so much. That really bonded us, because to be honest, we didn’t really sing for people usually. Everyone thinks we were just singing all the time, but we were pretty quiet about it. It was just that little Christmas CD that led him to believe that we were ready. He started managing us. He recorded us. He took us on the road. He was just amazing. He believed. He really believed in us.”

The Womack Sisters released their first single as an official trio, “Darling,” way back in 2017, but it wasn’t until 2022 — after several uncompromising years of grinding in L.A., applying the lessons learned from their parents and uncles — that they issue their first EP, Legacy. The mini-album paid homage to their heritage with a poignant cover of their grandfather’s iconic 1964 anthem, “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

“That really brought up a lot of emotion, because it’s all about loss and injustices. And that song really does count in present times. It’s the change we need still,” muses Zeimani. “It’s really about the fact that we still have so much work to do. That song is so relevant, and that’s the sad thing about it. With all the loss we’ve experienced personally — I lost my husband to gun violence [in 2020], a shooting in a grocery store — it’s things like that that just make you want to keep these songs in the ears of everybody. Because we all need a crutch, somebody to let us know that there’s better days ahead.”

“That song has been in our lives since we were children and we’ve always loved it, especially because it was one of the songs [Sam Cooke] got to put out about his passion, which was desegregation. And it was one of the last songs he recorded,” adds BG. “So, just out of respect for our family, we wanted to really bring it full-circle. A lot of kids today don’t even know who the Womack brothers are, or who our uncle was, or what they meant to music. We needed to refresh everybody’s memory about how great Sam Cooke’s music was.”

In the past few years, the sisters have written for several other artists, including B.o.B, Mya, and the Game, and they say they’d love to write with dream collaborators like Solange, Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, Jazmine Sullivan, Lucky Daye, Leon Bridges, and Chloe Bailey. But right now, they’re fully focused on their own music. “The stuff you write early in your life, before things are going good, is your most gritty work,” Zeimani explains. “So, we’d be foolish to be handing out our songs!”

“Our Uncle Bob actually gave us a phrase,” adds BG with a chuckle. “He said: ‘You don’t want to spread your sauce out too far.’”

Now, as the Womack Sisters prepare to release their full-length self-titled debut album on Daptone Records, and travel the world again as they embark on a tour that includes dates with Thee Sacred Souls, La Lom, and even Al Green, they’re ready to continue their family tradition in their own way — and in the process, immediately silence any naysayers who expect them to stick to a certain sound or might dismiss them as mere nepo babies.

“People definitely put that kind of pressure on us,” Zeimani acknowledges. “But we feel really confident in what we’re bringing to the table as artists, and in our ability to connect with people.”

Guitarist-to-the-stars Billy Morrison recently dropped the mini-rockumentary Who the F%@k Is Billy Morrison? ahead of his fourth solo album, Hollow. But a skim of his long list of career credits indicates that plenty of people know who he is, and he knows just about everybody.

In addition to his work with the Cult, Billy Idol, his late best friend Ozzy Osbourne, and the supergroups Camp Freddy, Circus Diablo, and Royal Machines, as well as his concurrent career as an acclaimed fine artist, Morrison has recruited a who’s-who roster for Hollow: Godsmack’s Sully Erna, Public Enemy’s Chuck D, Extreme’s Nuno Bettencourt, Guns N’ Roses’ Duff McKagan, Run-DMC’s Darryl McDaniels, the Offspring’s Dexter Holland, Cypress Hill’s B-Real, Fuel’s Brett Scallions, and his longtime Billy Idol bandmate, Steve Stevens. He’s well aware that the general public might always know him more for his famous friends than for his own CV — hence his doc’s cheeky title — but after all that he’s been through, he’s just happy to be making art on his own terms.

“I’m not trying to be Taylor Swift here,” he chuckles, speaking via Zoom with Licorice Pizza Records’ LPTV. “I’m not trying to carve out a huge solo career for myself. I am making music and putting out solo records because I love making music and I am able, luckily, to put them out. I have a record deal that doesn’t force me to be someone I’m not… and if any one person other than me likes the album, I’m a success.”

Ironically, in some ways, it actually is hard to know just who Billy Morrison is. He sometimes plays it close to the vest during his LPTV interview — like when it comes to discussing his friendship with Osbourne, or how he finally got sober in 1995 after a 15-year battle with substance abuse that he began when he was 14 — and he says he has no desire to write a tell-all autobiography like some of his formerly hard-living rock ‘n’ roll peers. He’s also been the subject of a few rumors and urban legends (which is a sure sign that he’s “made it,” right?), some of which amuse him, and one of which is he willing to clear up right now.

“I made the mistake of looking at Reddit the other day,” he laughs. “There was someone who was discussing, ‘Where does Billy Morrison get his money from, because he wears golden diamonds and drives expensive cars?’ And literally, there was a theory on there: In Europe, there is a Morrison Supermarket, and this person was saying, ‘Clearly he’s the heir to the Morrison Supermarket chain, because he has nice jewelry and a nice car.’ I mean, it doesn’t warrant the energy, but I really wanted to go on there and go, ‘Yeah, God forbid it’s about hard work and writing good music and painting good paintings and working hard!’ So yeah, I’m not the heir to the Morrison supermarket chain, just to be clear.”

photo: Jane Stuart

On the contrary, there was a time when Morrison didn’t even have enough money to buy supermarket groceries. He was homeless for two years  — and not “Hollywood homeless,” aka sleeping on friends’ sofas, but actually “sleeping under a piece of metal. It was sheet metal that I’d propped up on the sidewalk on 8th and Burlington, in the Alvarado District of Los Angeles. My only source of income was begging for money on freeway off-ramps, mainly,” he reveals. The harrowing experience inspired Hollow’s “very, very personal” title track.

“I have experienced people stepping over my body on the sidewalk and looking at me with disgust and judgment,” Morrison says flatly; he may be a man of mystery regarding certain subjects, but when it comes to talking about recovery and mental health, he’s an open book. “I have experienced begging for dimes, and not on the odd occasion — I spent years of my life like that, begging on the streets and people stepping over me and crossing the roads, crossing the street so they didn’t have to walk past me, judging me and criticizing me.”

Morrison thankfully got clean by age 29, but he freely admits that at one time, “I absolutely thought I’d be dead before I was 30, 100 percent. I mean, I was shooting heroin in my neck. I’ve been shot; I’ve been stabbed. Of course I thought I was going to die! And I didn’t give a shit. I didn’t care. Or at least I thought I didn’t care. There was absolutely no thought whatsoever of living, let alone having a career, let alone, God forbid, being somewhat happy. … It’s very hard to see that [possibility] when you’re shooting heroin in your neck and you’re homeless and the cops are trying to lock you up every five seconds. It’s not easy, but it is there. And so, my purpose is to try and not worry about talking about it in interviews. I’m not shy about it, because I am living proof that it’s possible.”

Morrison readily acknowledges that he’s unusually fortunate, which is why he has become such a staunch advocate for less fortunate others who are struggling — for instance, organizing regular all-star Above Ground mental health benefit concerts with his friend and fellow recovering addict, Dave Navarro, to raise funds and awareness for MusiCares. (Above Ground is on hiatus this year, but will hopefully be back 2027.)

“I think at some point in anyone’s career, you have to stop and look around and go, ‘I’m really lucky, and I want to give back in some way,’” Morrison muses. “My story is my story, and I think I’ve been put on this Earth to try and help people not die. And if you can hear the message from someone like Navarro or myself that it is OK to ask for help… we get led down this path and they use that expression, ‘You’re a pussy,’ or ‘Throw them in the army, that’ll sort ‘em out!’ And it doesn’t. It just kills people. It kills people, because they just go inwards and feel like they are not able to get the help that is out there. [Above Ground] started because we lost Chester [Bennington] and we lost Scott Weiland and Chris Cornell. They were dropping like flies. Dave and I were like, ‘Enough’s enough. We have to try and at least make a noise.’ We’re not trying to raise millions of dollars, though money is needed in those arenas. We’re just trying to use our voice to say, ‘If you are feeling trauma, PTSD, depression, anxiety, ADHD, all of that, you’re not alone. You’re not a weirdo. And there are plenty of resources that we can help you with. Just let us help you.’”

While Morrison was still a young man with many good years ahead of him when he got help and got a new lease on life, he has been a self-declared workaholic ever since. (“I don’t avoid burnout,” he chuckles, when asked about his work/life balance.” It seems he’s still trying to make up for lost time.

photo: Jane Stuart

“I clearly am a creative person that had — or not had his creativity stifled, but chose to stifle his creativity for a couple of decades with heroin and cocaine — and so, I am playing catch-up. I am exorcising the creative demons that most people exorcise when they’re 25,” Morrison explains. “Most of my peers — Nikki Sixx, Dave Navarro, Anthony Kiedis — formed a band in high school, wrote some songs, got signed, sold a few million records, bought the house, put some money in the bank, and then started shooting heroin or smoking cocaine or whatever they did. I’m not minimizing that trauma; that trauma is exactly the same. But the difference when you come out the other side is that you still have a house and some money in the bank. And I couldn’t even get that right! I woke up in my late twenties with nothing, not a dime to my name. So, that is why I’m playing catch-up with life. … I just woke up late and had this fire burning. And [Hollow] is the product, I guess, of that late bloom.”

Morrison is grateful for what he now calls his dream “day job,” which, along with buying all those Reddit-gossip-fueling gold chains and luxury automobiles, “takes me around the world to beautiful places where I can go stroll along the river in Prague or have oysters by the Sydney Opera House in Australia. That’s my job!” But he never expected to have a side job: as a contemporary painter whose works have been exhibited in fine art galleries around the world. And he owes that career to a certain famous friend.

“It absolutely was Ozzy’s fault that I became a proper fine artist! He pushed me into my first painting. I’ve always loved art; I’m surrounded by art in my house. I have an amazing private art collection,” Morrison says, as an original Andy Warhol painting can be seen hanging behind him in his home office. “But I never thought I could do it myself. Ozzy saw something in me that I didn’t even see in myself and pushed it, and it came out. …. We were in Argentina and I was having an argument with Ozzy, because he was driving me absolutely crazy, saying, ‘You should paint, you should paint!” And I’m like, ‘Ozzy, I can’t even draw a stick figure!’ But we were in an art supply store and to shut him up, I bought four colors, one brush, and a tiny little canvas.” Morrison ended up creating his first painting, of a skull — “I figured a skull seemed like a good thing to paint while hanging on the Black Sabbath tour!” — which he later gifted to Osbourne and Ozzy’s family. And suddenly, a new creative fire was lit.

“The feeling of putting paint to canvas and creating visual art was exactly as cathartic to me as learning to play ‘God Save the Queen’ by the Sex Pistols for the first time on guitar,” Morrison marvels. “It was absolutely the most incredible, energizing, creative, cathartic experience, and that was all I needed: Here’s another avenue to get the demons out, to express myself.”

Morrison exorcised many demons on Hollow, and enjoyed his hard-earned freedom to “make music in whatever genre I want to make that turns me on.’ That’s especially evident on the Judgment Night soundtrack-meets-Manchester banger “No Suspects,” which features no fewer than three hip-hop legends, all on the same track. It’s the most sociopolitical song on the album, but Morrison once again puts his guard up when asked specifically what it’s about, stressing that the rappers wrote their own lyrics for their respective verses.

“I like not to do things by halves, so just to get B-Real, Chuck D, and DMC on one track together! … Listen, you don’t ask Chuck D or B-Real or DMC to be on a song and then go, ‘But I need you to say this,’” he laughs. “[Chuck and DMC are] in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I let them do what they want!” However, Morrison does feel there are similarities between the protest energy of classic hip-hop and the old-school punk that he cut his teeth on.

“I am hugely influenced by early hip-hop: N.W.A., Public Enemy, Cypress Hill, all of that. Punk rock was not a haircut or a fashion statement. Punk rock was an attitude, and when N.W.A. came out of the gate, it was just a bunch of disenfranchised youths screaming as loud as they could that they had something to say. Well, that is punk rock,” he explains.

Speaking of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Billy Idol will finally be inducted this year (“The fact that it took Billy this long to get in, are you fucking kidding me?” sighs Morrison), and Morrison, who’s been in Idol’s band since 2010, will perform with the new wave legend at the ceremony, because his boss feels it’s crucial to have his crew share the stage and glory that night. “I will be there, yeah. And that encapsulates everything that is wonderful about being in Billy Idol’s band, because Billy is an old punk rocker that comes from the concept of a band. We are a band,” Morrison says proudly. “Billy takes that seriously, and I’m super-grateful.”

As for which songs Idol and his band might play at the Rock Hall’s November ceremony — Stevens has stated that he’d love for them to dust off a Generation X classic like “Kiss Me Deadly” — Morrison once again plays it close to his studded leather vest and quips, “I don’t know, and I don’t care. I’m just going to be there. I’m going to be there with my friends, and I’m going to support my friend. Billy and Steve are getting inducted. I don’t give a shit what we’re playing!”

So, now that Morrison is fully embracing and enjoying his second act — and now that plenty of people know his name, despite what his movie’s title sarcastic claims — what else does he want to do with his life? Apparently, he wants to really be in the movies.

“I would love to do a major motion picture. I love acting,” says Morrison, who’s had a few film and TV roles over the years. “Acting is another cathartic experience where you can let go, become someone else, and get the demons out. I would love to do a McG action movie or something like that… I want to be in a Guy Ritchie/Jason Statham movie.”

Watch Billy Morrison’s full LPTV interview in the video player at the top of this page.

Martin Lewis with Andrew Ridgeley & George Michael
in China, 1985 (photo courtesy of Martin Lewis)

Last week, Wham! 10 Days in China — a new documentary about the British duo’s historic 1985 journey to the East, as the first Western pop act to play Communist China — premiered in theaters. The film is actually a third cinematic chronicle of George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley’s concerts in Beijing and Canton (Guangzhou), following Foreign Skies, which played before Wham!’s farewell concert at Wembley Stadium in 1986, and the shelved If You Were There…, which didn’t get an official public screening until 2024.

If You Were There… was directed by renowned British New Wave filmmaker Lindsay Anderson (If…, O Lucky Man!, This Sporting Life), but was scrapped —  and later drastically reedited by music video director Andy Morahan, as Foreign Skies —  reportedly because both Wham! and their management thought Anderson’s $1.5 million film wasn’t commercial enough and featured too little actual concert footage. A Guardian feature that ran decades later detailed the clash between the two camps, including Michael blocking the film’s release all the way up until his death in 2016, Ridgeley saying the decision to hire Anderson was “bonkers,” and Anderson disparaging the band and the film in his journal entries.

With Wham!’s Chinese tour back in the news and back in cinemas, Martin Lewis — the producer who came up with the ambitious If You Were There… concept, and hired his “hero,” Anderson, to direct — feels the need to speak out. Lewis (a showbiz lifer who got his start interning for Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, and whose dizzyingly diverse CV includes work with Monty Python, cast members of The Young Ones and Absolutely Fabulous, and far too many A-list rock stars to list here) is quick to praise 10 Days in China director Mike Christie. But he stresses that 10 Days in China “would not have been possible if [Christie] didn’t have 21 hours of stunningly brilliant [Anderson] footage by cameramen who were directed by one of the great British filmmakers.”

Lewis explains to Lyndsanity, “I love Lindsay Anderson, and I feel it’s my duty to stand up for him. I’m proud to do that. And I will do it also because I love Wham!, and I am exceptionally proud of the work I did with them. … [If You Were There… ] is a beautiful, beautiful film. It’s just not a pop documentary. It was never meant to be.”

In the exclusive Q&A below, Lewis gives his account of the making of If You Were There…, including why Ridgeley needed to be fitted for an emergency wig; why a related hair emergency prompted Michael to cancel a pickup shoot at the last minute; how Michael was convinced to be interviewed on camera during a naked massage; how under different circumstances, Michael and Anderson could have become friends and collaborators; what Lindsay’s original vision was; and why Lewis hopes that the famously “litigious” George Michael estate will one day greenlight an If You Were There… home video release.

And along the way, Lewis (a colorful character whose favorite catchphrase is “but I digress…”) shares anecdotes about third-wheeling on a steakhouse date with Michael and a certain ‘80s it-girl; why he went on TV to defend Michael after Michael’s Beverly Hills park restroom scandal; and much, much more.

LYNDSANITY: Please explain what exactly your role was during Wham!’s trip to China.

MARTIN LEWIS: For all my sins, I was the person who instigated the filming of Wham! when they went there. I hired the director, Lindsay Anderson. I pitched the project, and I produced the original film, If You Were There… I also was the listed producer of Foreign Skies, which is the adaptation from that.

It’s interesting that If You Were There… never officially came out, and that most of Lindsay’s footage was unseen and gathering dust in a warehouse until it was given to Mike Christie to make 10 Days in China.

I will say straight off, I’m a big fan of the film that Mike Christie has made. I think he’s done an extremely good job. It’s such a vast story, and I think given how broad the story is, Mike made very good choices about what to focus on. But the notion that it was a mistake to hire [Anderson] is absolutely, factually wrong. And the proof of that is how brilliant Mike’s film is, because Mike’s film is 75 percent, approximately, all footage that was shot by Lindsay. The film Mike made would not have been possible if he didn’t have 21 hours of stunningly brilliant footage by cameramen who were directed by one of the great British filmmakers.

Good point. But the argument has been made by some people — including Andrew Ridgeley — that Lindsay was not the right director for the job, because his film was very slow. Mike Christie described it to me as “ambient.” Basically, Lindsay did not make a pop movie.

It’s not a cutting-edge, fast-paced film. But it wasn’t ever designed to be. “Stately” is what I would call it. My original title for it was 10 Days That Shook the World: A Cultural Revelation. It was always supposed to be all about the cultural revolution — and this was a cultural revelation both ways. I know what the alternative was: The alternative was a music video director, like Andy Morahan. Andy is an extremely good video director and has even made some feature films, but do they match If…, O Lucky Man!, or This Sporting Life? You tell me. The height of Andy Morahan’s filmmaking career is Highlander 3. And Highlander 3 was definitely the third-best of the three Highlander films.

So, sure, you could shoot a bog-standard MTV travelogue and do all the beauty shots — Tiananmen Square, so instead of Club Tropicana, you got Club Tiananmen — but what would it achieve at the end of the day? You’d be preaching to the choir, preaching to the converted. You’d just be making something that would please Wham!’s existing fanbase. But if instead of doing a puff piece or vanity piece, you did a serious documentary about this bizarre cultural juxtaposition, that gets you something different. You’d have a film that could be in film festivals. You’d have a film that would elevate the conversation about Wham!, because at that time they were being considered as just the contemporaries of Culture Club and Duran Duran. This would elevate Wham! into a different dialogue. They would be seen as cultural ambassadors. I wasn’t necessarily thinking that we would win an Oscar, but this would be a classy, elegant film, not a pop confection for MTV — which is why it’s regrettable that this nonsense is being spouted. The band’s management loved this concept.

How did you pitch this high-brow concept to Wham!’s management?

I’d known [Wham! co-manager] Jazz Summers for 14 years. [Summers’s business partner] Simon Napier-Bell was already well-known; he’d been a character in the ’60s, an impresario who’d worked with Marc Bolan and the Yardbirds. Jazz Summers was a nobody, but he was really hard-working. So, the analogy is very simple: Simon was the show horse, Jazz was the workhorse. Fast-forward to February 1985. I’m living in New York and I get a phone call out of the blue from Jazz. I hadn’t heard from him from since the late ’70s when he was managing punk acts, and he’d tracked me down. He and Simon were managing a pop group called Wham!, and he invited me to see them. It was at the Beacon Theater, and they were pretty impressive. We went to dinner afterwards with George and Andrew, who couldn’t have been less interested in two old hippies talking about the good old days. Why would they want to listen to these two boring old guys going on about the ‘60s? So, George and Andrew sat at the table disinterested in us, but Jazz and I started chatting. He said, “Simon and I want to make Wham! the first Western group to go to China.” And a light bulb went off in my head, instantly. I immediately thought of Elton John going to Russia in 1979. I said, “That’s a film!” And Jazz said, “Great. Do you want to make it?” And I said, “Yeah.” That was the development process.

Were George and Andrew sold on this idea?

Well, George and Andrew were just a bubblegum act when Simon and Jazz came around, so that’s how Simon and Jazz treated them. Simon especially was from that era of the Idol Maker type of managers, the Colonel Tom Parker type, where the managers are the puppetmasters; it’s Pygmalion, and the artists simply do what they’re told. The best [Wham!] deal that Jazz and Simon had done up until China was the “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” video, which was genius: Wham! were wearing Fila sportswear, a branding opportunity and sponsorship deal that Jazz and Simon pulled together. And guess who told them to put shuttlecocks in their shorts?

Anyway, at that time, George had not expressed that he wanted to be a “serious” artist. He was a bubblegum act, and a consequence of that meant Jazz and Simon didn’t share every detail of their plan. They said, “We’re going to China. It’s a big PR scam to break in America.” That was it. They didn’t say, “We’re going to make a film of it, and we’ve got a good film director.” They didn’t go into granular detail. They didn’t explain any of that. And that’s where the breakdown happened. George and Andrew had a passion for music, for clubbing, for dancing, for fashion, stuff like that, but they didn’t have time to be interested in an auteur film director like Lindsay Anderson. They were just like, “Oh, all right, whatever you say.” And that was the seed of the problem, because there was a different agenda going on. George and Andrew were never in on the plan. When I had the conversations with George years later, he said, “They never told me that. They never told me anything about film festivals.”

It’s my understanding that George and Andrew didn’t want to go to China at all, let alone have camera crews trail them everywhere.

Yes, it was enough that they were having to deal with this tour, but actually the thing that irritated them most — but was an essential ingredient for which Jazz and Simon should be congratulated, not pilloried — was they took the press with them. Jazz and Simon understood that being the first Western pop act in China would be like catnip to the media, but George and Andrew resented having the press with them all the time, particularly because Andrew had become a “bad boy” in both the song title and reality. Andrew was being portrayed as “Randy Andy,” always chasing after girls. Wham! were in the front pages, and at that time, the British media had two things that sold newspapers: Princess Diana and pop stars. The British tabloid media are like piranhas, disgusting creatures; it’s very hard for Americans to understand just how virulent the British tabloid media really are. And they treated George and Andrew with such disrespect, especially for how young they were. Now George and Andrew had to be on a plane, and then for 10 days in China, with the very people they hated. So, there was a tension already set up.

photo: Martyn Goddard

But some of the most fascinating footage that ended up in Mike Christie’s 10 Days in China documentary are the tense moments — like Andrew being surly during the awkward Beijing press conference, or that massage scene where George is lying on the spa table, trying to relax, but he’s disgruntled and venting about how he’s not enjoying this trip.

The massage scene, I’ll take full credit for! Lindsay didn’t approve that, and he told me off! What happened was George and I had developed a bantering relationship. I was 10 years older, so it was like an older brother/younger brother thing. I became the “George whisperer,” is how I regard it. He said, “No, no, I don’t want to do an interview. I’m off to have a massage.” And I said, “Well, you’ve got to let me film that, then!” And because we had a jokey relationship, he said, “You’re not going to show anything, are you?” But George gave me the green light and I grabbed [cameraman] Paul Cameron. I’m just loving it, thinking, “This is what the fans want! George being massaged!” I joke that I was a pioneer of reality TV. I whisper in Paul’s ear, “Ask George some questions! Ask him about China.” And George is so relaxed that he gives real answers, and it’s perfect. I mean, on one level, it’s bizarre, George offering his opinion on Communism, and that’s why Lindsay told me off. But it’s real. It’s natural. It’s authentic.

Didn’t some naysayers actually accuse Lindsay of having a Communist agenda?

Yes, he was pretty much a punching bag for people to say, “He was fired because he was a Communist,” because he was left-of-center, I mean, I literally read that! Simon said, “Oh, it’s his Communist point of view.” Listen, I love Simon. If you want to have a dinner guest to make you laugh, Simon’s your man. But his book [I’m Coming to Take You to Lunch: A Fantastic Tale of Boys, Booze and How Wham! Were Sold to China] should have won the Pulitzer for fiction. But I don’t condemn Simon. He was an incredible character.

Did Wham! butt heads with Lindsay from the beginning?

Lindsay hadn’t pissed them off. Lindsay had barely spoken to them. Lindsay and George and Andrew barely had any conversations. However, there was a cordiality that Lindsay expected. And there was a moment when it really turned. During the press conference, Wham! were asked, “Tell us about this film that’s being made,” and George, without a trace of irony and not trying to make a joke, said, “Oh, we’re making a film, and we’ve got a competent director called Lindsay Anderson.” Now, Lindsay at that time was 62. He’d won the Oscar in 1954 for Best Documentary Short. He was regarded in Britain as like a Martin Scorsese. He was a very respected filmmaker. Can you imagine if, when Martin Scorsese did No Direction Home, there’d been a press conference and Bob Dylan had said, “Oh, we’ve got Martin Scorsese, a ‘competent’ director”? Now, I don’t think George meant to be insulting; he just had no knowledge of how important and special Lindsay was. But Lindsay was really hurt by that. Lindsay understood it had come out of ignorance rather than meanness, but he was thinking that either George should have done some homework, or somebody should’ve informed him of how important Lindsay was. To be described as “competent” really hurt Lindsay’s feelings.

photo: Neal Preston

It seemed like George was already starting to bristle against the whole teenybopper thing.

Yes, and what I spotted was Jazz and Simon were in fear of George. I remember when I needed to get George to go to the Great Wall, no one would go to his hotel room, because they didn’t want to be the ones who George said “piss off” to. Nobody would do it! I saw that as a warning sign, that there was something amiss in this relationship. I later found out they were all frightened of George because he’d started to find his real self, even though he was only 21. Nobody wanted to ask him to do something he didn’t want to do, because he’d bite their head off and it would be a black mark against them. So, good ol’ foolish Martin, the designated George whisperer, is delegated to go up and knock on George’s door. He’s lying on his bed listening to Madonna on his Sony Walkman, and I say, “Come on, George, we’re going to the Great Wall of China.” He says, “I don’t feel like it. I’m not in the mood. Not interested.” I say, “Forget the fucking film, George! It’s one of the Seven Wonders of the World! It’s visible from outer space! Aren’t you just remotely curious to see this thing?” And he shrugged and said, “Seen one wall, seen ‘em all.” That actually had me in hysterics.

Even though If You Were There… was never conceptualized as a concert film, Lindsay did shoot the shows in Beijing and Canton. One of the criticisms If You Were There… received was its lack of live footage, which surprised people and apparently upset the band.

There was an implication back in the day that Lindsay had been so inefficient that they had to shoot more [live footage], that there wasn’t enough concert coverage in China because of Lindsay Anderson. And that got my blood boiling, because I know the truth. It was a fairly traumatic experience. As I said, there was no way that this was a concert film. No way at all. Not economically viable. A concert film would’ve been shot on video. We would have needed eight to 10 camera crews, multiple cameras, a big truck. It’s not functionally possible to take a video truck into China, not even remotely possible. So, we were going to do it old-school, with film. And since we had five cameras, that was the most the budget would allow. We would only be able to film a little bit of each concert. In Beijing, we only had that night to shoot, and of course, we did not want to obstruct the audience. We did reasonably well, but there wasn’t an opportunity to do any closeups, because you cannot put cameras in the way of paying audience members.

photo: Martyn Goddard

I sat down with Michael Owen, my associate producer, and he told me, “I’m worried about the coverage we’re getting. I think we need to do a second shoot in Canton. We need to shoot closeups.” Jazz agreed. So, the morning after [the actual Canton concert], the music crew assembled to play a whole [staged, audience-free] show. And suddenly George comes up and says, “I don’t feel like doing it today.” I thought he was teasing, but he said, “No, I’m serious. I’m not doing it. It’s too humid in here. My hair’s going to frizz.” He was petrified that his hair would go frizzy — there’s famous stories about how the “Careless Whisper” music video was re-shot because he didn’t like his hair.

I immediately did what any producer would do in that role, and said, “I’ve got it sorted. I’ll get some dehumidifiers in here.” Classic producer bullshit. How did I know how to get dehumidifiers on a Friday morning in Canton?” But George said, “No, I just don’t feel like doing it.” I said, “We need closeups,” and then he said, “Well, we could just do it all in [Surrey production facility] Shepperton.” I said, “Shepperton? We’ve got a vintage Chinese theater here. You want me to recreate the stage of a vintage Chinese theater and get all your musicians, dancers, everybody onstage looking identical, back in England? It’s not possible!” And he said, “Martin, anything is possible.” I was literally losing the battle with this 21-year-old. So, I thought, “I’ll play the trump card that cannot fail. I’m going to beat George on this.” I told him it’d cost about a half a million dollars. And George said, “All right, that’s what we’ll do, then. We’ll shoot it in England.” I said, “But it’s a half a million dollars!” And he said, “Yes. And it’s my money.”

So, you literally staged a whole reenactment of a Wham! Chinese concert at Shepperton Studios in England?

Yes. It wasn’t discussed with Lindsay, who was pissed off with me — and understandably, because he’s saying, “This is insanity!” Lindsay was not used to a youngster of 21 dictating the way things were done. This was a young pop singer wanting to spend half a million dollars of his own money because he was worried about his hair frizzing. But that was the world of pop music in 1985. What the star wants, the star gets. So, we tried our best to make sure that everything would be fine. We didn’t have an official continuity person, but we went around photographing everybody that was onstage [in Canton], taking a million Polaroids, so that when we regrouped in London, we could make sure everyone was dressed the same and the hair and everything looked the same.

And then, at Shepperton, Andrew saunters in, calm as anything — with a crew cut! A buzzed crew cut. He looked like an American astronaut circa 1965. His days of being a floppy-haired Hugh Grant were over. And Andrew’s wondering why all our jaws are on the floor. We say, “Don’t you remember that thing about showing up looking identical to the way you looked in China?” He’d completely forgotten. He’d just gone out and got a haircut because he felt like it. We had to cancel that day’s shoot and get a wig made. And fortunately, because my background was in comedy as well as music, I knew where to go. I went to Wig Creations on Portman Street, near Baker Street where Sherlock Holmes fictionally resided, and commissioned a wig for Andrew Ridgeley. They made a wig in 24 hours, and we reconvened the next day at Shepperton and shot a whole concert, like we would have done in Canton. And Lindsay is sitting there with a quizzical, wry look on his face. I think he was rather bemused.

You say you had no official crew member in charge of continuity, so was it at all obvious which shots were with Andrew’s real hair, and which ones had the wig?

When I’ve looked at both If You Were There… and Foreign Skies, I see the slippage, or the discrepancy. But the reality is, the average Wham! fan would be thrilled to see George and Andrew on the big screen and wouldn’t be paying that much attention. I don’t know if it pops up on IMDB where they have a “goofs” page or something like that, but I’m a detail freak, so I notice that sort of stuff anyway. I remember thinking, “Oh my God, look at that! That’s a wig!” That was not fun in the editing room, as you may imagine. I remember saying, “Look at Andrew’s hair. Will anyone notice? Can we get away with it?”

So, Lindsay finally began shaping these 21 or so hours of footage into his full-length film. What happened next?

When Lindsay got into the editing room, he was fascinated with the footage and started to get excited. When you’re directing a documentary in the verité or direct cinema style, you tell your cinematographers what to film, and really, you make the film in the editing room. That was his sweet spot. That’s a creative artist at his best, starting to really realize what he can do with the material. Lindsay kept reaching out [to Wham!], saying, “Come into the editing room and have a look at it. Let’s work on it.” But that was like salt in the wound for George. In George’s mind, he did this [China tour] so that he would break in America, and that’s the only reason he did it. Now Lindsay wanted him to go look at pictures?

But I also think that George was cut off anyway, because Lindsay was told, as was I, that we couldn’t have direct contact. We had to go through Jazz or Simon — which really meant Jazz, because Simon was off swanning around the world. Lindsay would send these beautiful letters encouraging George to come to the editing room and perhaps compose; Lindsay did appreciate George’s gifts as a writer, so he thought maybe George would like to compose some incidental music. Lindsay was not hearing back, I believe, because George was never getting the letters. But Lindsay didn’t know that, so when he was fired, he started saying these terrible things about George being conceited and stuck-up in an ivory tower. But I think that was just George being protected from anything to do with the China experience. And that was really painful for Lindsay. I think that broke Lindsay Anderson’s heart, so a lot of the mean-spirited things he wrote and said [later] came out of that. And I understand that.

Did you ever get a chance to discuss the film privately with George?

Yes, when I ended up being the third wheel on his date with Brooke Shields. I don’t know if it was to protect him from Brooke Shields. That was one of the weirdest experiences of my life. He called me when we were both in New York and said, “Do you want to get together to talk about the film, if there’s anything you need to talk about?” I loved it when he was on the road, because when he was on the road, he would call himself; it wouldn’t go through the managers. I said, “Well, there’s a bundle of stuff to talk about!” Because they hadn’t seen the film yet. We pick a day and a time, I walk over there… and he’s sitting there with Brooke Shields.

I say, “Oh, I didn’t realize you were having dinner with somebody. I don’t mean to intrude. Maybe we should just regroup tomorrow.” He says, “Oh no, Brooke won’t mind. Join us!” I thought, “Really?” Because I didn’t know if the supermarket tabloid stuff was true — that Brooke had a big crush on George — but if this was a date, you don’t need some boring old English guy talking about work. I’m feeling slightly uncomfortable, and Brooke, bless her, is very sweet, but she’s not understanding why George has invited me. We’re talking about the film, and Brooke is a little bit disappointed, and then she orders the equivalent of some dandelion fluff with some chard and some nectar and some daffodil seeds or something. It was like these vegan flowers on her plate. Meanwhile, George orders half a roast duck with roast potatoes. I’m thinking to myself, “I don’t know about the other aspects, but they’re not going to get along gastronomically!” I remember that because I pinched one of the roast potatoes from his plate, I’m afraid to admit.

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It’s a shame that there was such a communication breakdown during this project, because if circumstances had been different, I feel there would have been a great deal of mutual respect between Lindsay and George. They were both true artists who took their craft seriously.

I think that had there been input, Lindsay would have included more music if they’d wanted that. Because we had it. But he was trying to keep a balance. The whole thing is, when he showed [a rough cut of If You Were There…] to them, it wasn’t for approval. We were anticipating another six months of editing. This was just to get input, to make it a collaborative process — if George and Andrew hadn’t had their minds misled by Jazz and Simon to expect something completely different. They were expecting a home movie of their Chinese vacation.

Had George got to spend time with Lindsay, they would have connected. If George had not been set against him by Jazz and Simon, I think George would have found Lindsay to be a fascinating person. Maybe at 21, it just wasn’t the right time for him to sit down with a guy from another generation who’s 40 years older than him. But he would have found an artistic camaraderie with Lindsay. Like I said, Lindsay reckoned that George would be interested in making incidental music, some sort of score, and that might have given George a creative avenue, a way to feel positive about what had been a bad experience. George wrote, sang, arranged, and produced everything was coming out of his head, and I don’t think that Jazz or Simon probably encouraged that enough, because they were thinking of collecting those golden eggs. But anyway, I was forbidden to contact George directly, as was Lindsay. I had to put it through Jazz as the gatekeeper. And I am virtually certain that what happened was Jazz shut it down. Jazz was clearly not wanting to give George another task, another chore.

I also don’t know if there was any tension also between Lindsay and George about the gay thing. Lindsay was from a generation of gay people when you could not even show it or discuss it — or, in his case, act upon it. Lindsay was gay, but he was never out and it was never discussed; it was assumed by people, but he never had a gay relationship. He was raised in an era where there was such negativity [towards homosexuality] that a lot of people never came out, or didn’t feel they could. George had come out to Andrew and [Wham! singer] Shirlie and others, but he was not definitively only gay at that point. I don’t know whether Lindsay had a gaydar, if he’d have suspected or felt that George was likely gay. And I don’t know that George would have necessarily sensed that about Lindsay.

Why was Lindsay’s footage ultimately re-edited to be more of a typical MTV pop doc, Foreign Skies?

Well, George was burnt by China. The experience of China, Wham! being turned into performing fleas and being thrust into that kind of artificial world, was not a comfortable thing. He was burnt by the British media. It’s important to note that a little bit after China, George was starting to make noise [about wanting to go solo]. They did a stadium tour, and then George said, “That’s it. I’m done. Wham! is over. Next year is the end.” Jazz and Simon were absolutely gobsmacked and really pissed off, because they’d thought they had another five years of Wham! So, Lindsay had done exactly what he’d been hired to do, which was to make a beautiful, real visual documentary about this fascinating juxtaposition, but Jazz took one look at it and said, “Oh my God, we can’t make this into a pop video. The word-of-mouth on it will be terrible. It won’t sell. We’ve got to change the film.” I said, “But this is what you agreed to!” They said, “I know that, Martin. But our plans have changed.” They weren’t exactly spelling out the financial reasons, but it was very clear that it was financial.

Meaning, now that Simon and Jazz realized Wham!’s days were numbered, they wanted to milk it as much as they could? So, they decided they now wanted a more mainstream, MTV-friendly film?

Yes, basically that. I said, “The film is not going to change. This is what you hired Lindsay for. If you’d wanted a pop film, you would have hired Andy Morahan.” I was appalled by all this. It just rubbed me the wrong way. I just ethically could not do it. Lindsay Anderson had been a hero of mine. I couldn’t fire him. I knew they had the right to do it, but it was wrong, morally and ethically. So, I just said, “I’m out of here.” And I resigned.

Eventually, Foreign Skies premiered at Wembley Stadium, right before Wham!’s big farewell concert, just a little more than a year after Wham! had played in China. Did you and Lindsay attend?

Lindsay didn’t go. He was feeling pretty burned. Later he said to me, “What happened with the film?” I said, “Well, they showed you on [Wembley’s] giant screens.” He said, “Where was it positioned?” I said, “We were between Elton John dressed as Ronald McDonald, and Gary Glitter.” [Editor’s note: Glitter and a clown-costumed Elton performed at Wham!’s final concert.] And Lindsay, who was always a sardonic guy, just said a very English word. He said, “Quite.” And that was his only word on the subject. Quite.

Do you think George regretted not giving Lindsay a chance in 1985?

No, because he wasn’t a look-back person in that regard. I don’t think in general that he was a look-back type of guy.

But even if George and Andrew didn’t understand or appreciate Lindsay’s vision at the time, I feel like George at least would have eventually warmed to the idea of a “serious” film that showed Wham!’s cultural impact — especially because he struggled so much in his early career to be taken seriously. Did you ever try to convince George to release If You Were There…?

George found it very easy to say no to things. He said no to a million projects. And if he said no, that was it; you couldn’t go back and revisit it. I approached him several times about this, and it would have been the easiest thing in the world for George to say, “No more talk about the China film! I’m never going back. I don’t want to look at that again. It’s done. Forget it!” But he never said no to me on this. He always said, “Maybe. But not this year.” And his manager, Michael Lippman, told me to keep coming back.

Simon and Jazz were no longer managing solo George at this point?

No. I think Jazz would have been a good manager for him, but there was a very good reason why George didn’t stay with Simon. Simon was very good at putting shuttlecocks in shorts, but perhaps not so good at managing a respected artist. And I say that with affection.

What does Andrew think of If You Were There…, after all these years?

Andrew has been very respectful. I think he’s led a very dignified life. He’s known that he’s been the butt of jokes, and he’s held himself in a very gracious and graceful manner. I give Andrew huge credit for how he’s handled his post-Wham! life. But he was not in the room when George and I discussed the film years later. He wasn’t in the room with Michael Lippman. I can’t expect Andrew to do the right thing, because Andrew can’t know the purpose of the film, so it’s not for him to offer an opinion on it. Andrew actually said, “I don’t think George ever wants it to be seen,” and respectfully, he’s wrong about that. But Andrew also said, “I think at one point there should be a triple-disc release, that maybe all three films should come out [packaged together].” And Andrew is spot-on about that.

In 2024, If You Were There… was finally screened at the British Film Institute. What was the critical reaction?

Some serious papers like The Guardian and The Times and The Telegraph reviewed it. A couple of them didn’t like it, but The Guardian liked it. It’s also available to see if you go to Lindsay’s archive at the University of Stirling in Scotland, if you’re a serious researcher. It was well-reviewed by people because it is a beautiful, beautiful film. It’s just not a pop documentary. It was never meant to be.

How much were you in touch with George after the whole China debacle?

We stayed in contact until the end of his life. I’m not going to claim we were close buddies or anything like that, but we stayed in occasional contact. But here’s the thing: He knew that it was my idea to hire Lindsay. I’m the guy he remembers from the film; he remembers me much more than he remembers Lindsay. If he was so angry about that film, or so pissed off about the choice of Lindsay, he would not have stayed friends with me. He wasn’t like that. But he did, because he was a mensch.

So, I stayed friends with George, and I had wonderful conversations with him. When he was outed in Beverly Hills, when he was busted, I was so outraged that I went on a tabloid TV show — Inside Edition, A Current Affair, Entertainment Tonight, one of those — and I defended George. I said it was ludicrous and that this was clearly entrapment. I made some joke about how they’d said it was a “plainclothes cop,” but [the arresting officer] was wearing a $2,000 Gucci jacket, so that’s not “plain” clothes! Then I ran into George at a party about six months later; he’d actually seen the interview, and he was very appreciative. He was very touched that I’d stood up for him. But the thing that amused him was the news show didn’t know how to caption me, so they’d captioned me as “producer and longtime companion.” And George joked, “I outed you!” [Editor’s note: Lewis is straight.]

And George never forgot my dancing. In Canton, they had a nightclub where we would all let off steam each day, and I was dancing, drunk, happy that it was all over, letting my hair down. George came up to me and said, “Martin, I’ve been in a lot of clubs and discos all over the world, and in all that time, I’ve never seen anybody who’s a worse dancer than you. You are literally the worst dancer I’ve ever seen in my life.” And I said, “Can I quote you on that?” He said, “You have to quote me on that!” That was our banter. And he’s right. I have some quotes on my website from major stars who’ve been kind enough to say nice things about me, but the only one that’s a diss is George’s comment about my dancing.

That is a quite an endorsement! So, now that you’ve had a chance to speak out about Lindsay Anderson and Wham!, what are you hoping will come from this? Are you hoping the three-disc DVD or Blu-Ray package that Andrew Ridgeley suggested — that is, compiling If You Were There…, Foreign Skies, and Wham! 10 Days in China — will one day come out?

Let me just give some gentle marketing advice here to the [George Michael] estate, which isn’t interested in my marketing advice, because what do I know, I’ve only been doing this for about 55 years: Make this a triple-disc thing. Keep Lindsay’s cut as it was, but restore it. And I will personally — for no money, guys, because I know money is very important to you at the George Michael estate — wrangle some people who will help sell that triple-package. I will wrangle Malcolm McDowell, who I’ve worked with before, and I will wrangle Brian Cox, who, like me and Malcolm, has an appreciation for Lindsay Anderson. I’ll make a short featurette about Lindsay with some big names, and I’ll do it all for free, because I love Lindsay Anderson, and I feel it’s my duty to stand up for him. I’m proud to do that. And I will do it also because I love Wham!, and I am exceptionally proud of the work I did with them. I hope the George Michael estate is enlightened enough to follow Andrew Ridgeley’s good suggestion. Do a three-disc set. You’ll make a gazillion dollars.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

If These Walls Could Rock, a documentary directed by Tyler Measom and Craig A. Williams about legendary Hollywood hideaway the Sunset Marquis hotel, is packed with many wild rock ‘n’ roll tales. For instance…

This “rock ‘n’ roll friars club,” founded in 1963 in partnership with the Sunset Strip’s Playboy Club, was where a frustrated Bruce Springsteen hurled the initial acetate of Born to Run into the hotel pool, and where he later met Born on the Fourth of July author, activist, and Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, who inspired him to write the “Born in the USA” B-side “Shut Out the Light.” It’s where Duran Duran blacked out their windows with foil and opened their own secret, afterhours nightclub called Privacy. It’s where the Red Hot Chili Peppers dove from the roof into the pool, and where Green Day dyed their suite’s carpet green. It’s where Dave Grohl met his wife Jordan Blum and took a bath with Ringo Starr (presumably on two separate occasions). It’s where Billy Bob Thornton, the unofficial/self-appointed “mayor” of the Sunset Marquis who lived at the hotel between his many divorces, had sex in a stairwell with one of the estimated 100 dates he entertained there, and where Thornton woke up with his head in Jeff Beck’s lap (again, presumably on two different occasions). It’s where the Black Crowes’ Chris Robisnon spotted Keith Richards strolling by the pool with a knife tucked into one hip of his Speedos and a pack of cigarettes in the other, sipping on a piña colada.

It’s where the reclusive Morrissey was photographed for six album covers. It’s where the Black Crowes’ Chris Robinson spotted Keith Richards strolling by the pool with a knife tucked into one hip of his Speedos and a pack of cigarettes in the other, sipping on a piña colada. It’s where Depeche Mode held poolside court in the infamous hot tub, which many of If These Walls Could Rock’s talking heads believe not all the chlorine in Los Angeles could effectively sanitize. And it was the only L.A. hotel guaranteed not to kick out Ozzy Osbourne, so the Osbournes were frequent guests. Kelly Osbourne — who, much to her mother Sharon’s dismay, took many dips in that probably-tainted jacuzzi — even had her first drink, first kiss, and first line of cocaine at the hotel, the latter supplied by one of her unnamed dad’s famous friends in a “very big band.”

Heart guitarist Nancy Wilson’s anecdotes in the film aren’t quite as debauched, but much like the Osbournes, she fondly thinks of the Sunset Marquis as a family place, a “home away from home.” It was where she processed her grief and sought comfort during her own divorce from her first husband, filmmaker Cameron Crowe, and where the kind-hearted, discreet, and always reliable hotel staff took swift action when her older sister, Heart frontwoman Ann Wilson, experienced a medical emergency. And it was an especially safe haven for the Wilsons in the 1980s, when Heart exploded into the MTV mainstream — the band’s most successful decade in terms of record sales and chart numbers, but a “pressurized” era when the music industry’s extreme emphasis on big hair, small bodies, and style over substance strained Nancy and Ann’s relationship.

Years later, the sisters had a major falling-out that put the future of Heart in doubt. “It was between 2016 and 2019 that things got kind of fubar: f***ed up beyond recognition,” Nancy says. And although the Wilsons resumed touring in 2019, even embarking on a triumphant comeback tour after Ann’s 2024 cancer diagnosis and treatment, Heart have not released a studio album in over a decade.

However, as Nancy reminisces about If These Walls Could Rock, the “extremely happy” musician can’t help but giddily tease Heart’s own forthcoming, long-delayed new biopic and documentary, as well as a nearly finished “really, really strong” new Heart album. “It really feels like a Heart record. … It’s all about these songs. It’s what we were born to do, and do together,” Nancy says proudly. “Hopefully ‘27 and ‘28 will be the year for Heart world domination, basically.”

Here, Nancy opens up about her good times and bad times at the Sunset Marquis (including being haunted by a spliff-toking phantom that may or may not be the ghost of Jim Morrison); how Heart survived the big ‘80s; how Ann’s battle with “the big C” helped the once-estranged Wilson sisters become “super-reconnected”; why Heart’s reunion is “really sweeter than ever” now that “a lot of the drama that was kind of swirling has come to a halt”; and what to expect from the forthcoming Heart album and their own films.

LYNDSANITY: I love your dip-dyed pink hair. You were rocking that color at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ceremony last year.

NANCY WILSON: Yeah, I got my pink on again! It was starting to fade out; there’s this one color that lasts forever, but it finally faded. The Heart album is almost finished up now, and the photo shoot was happening, so I was like, “I gotta get my pink on for the Heart thing,” because the recording’s all done.

That’s exciting news!

Yeah, it’s really, really strong. I think it’s going to be great. We wrote a bunch of new songs and recorded down in Nashville with the players that we just played the last tour with. It was like a secondhand thing with each other because we’ve played so many live shows, so the album was pretty much recorded live.

Wow. How long has it been since Heart released an album of new, original material?

The last album 10 years ago was called Beautiful Broken. … Before that, Fanatic and Red Velvet Car were the last two studio albums. So, yeah, it’s crazy! I’m really happy. It really feels like a Heart record.

When is this album coming out?

Well, we’re delivering it at the end of August. And so, with the world tour to set up and a documentary film to work on and a live-action feature film and an album and a tour and a new management company, we’re getting all of those ducks in a row, so that we can strategize the rollout.

A few years ago I interviewed Ann, and she told me at that time that the Heart biopic was very early stages. I think the pandemic might’ve changed things, but a Heart biopic was in the works, and Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein was writing and directing. Lynda Obst was producing, and it was going to be on Amazon.

Well, since then, yeah, the pandemic happened. And Lynda Obst unfortunately passed away. She was one of the Mount Rushmore producers in the movie industry for a long time. The original lunch I had with her before the pandemic was about, “There needs to be a Heart film. My granddaughter who’s 12 is a huge Heart fan and she wants to learn guitar and wants to be in a band, and this would be a film for them” — for the next generation of not just girls, but musicians coming in. And then the pandemic and a lot of different back-and-forth with management and different stuff just kind of blockaded the process for a long time. But I just now got off the phone with Julie Oh, who was the replacement for Lynda Obst, and we’re back on track with Carrie Brownstein for the next draft, the final draft, to hopefully get this thing rolling again. Sometimes good things take time, but we’re back on the tracks with it.

Have you cast it yet?

No, but there have been a lot of actresses that were excited to be asked to play the parts of me and my sister. But we haven’t got that far yet. We need the final draft.

I recall Ann liked the idea of Anne Hathaway portraying her. Who would you want to play you?

I think maybe Elle Fanning would be a really good. I think Florence Pugh would be real good for Ann. But there are a lot of cool young actors coming up right now that could do it. I don’t know who would play the older version, because there’s a big lifespan! I think, though, the story mainly just goes from the beginning to probably [Heart's 2012 Led Zeppelin tribute at] the Kennedy Center. There’s enough of an arc right there to kind of cover it all.

It’s interesting that you mentioned Florence Pugh, because when I interviewed Belinda Carlisle recently, there’s been talks of a Go-Go’s biopic, and she said Florence would be good to play her. And at one time when a Madonna biopic was still in talks, Florence was in the running to play Madonna.

Yeah, she’s a rockin’ actress, for sure!

Do you have a title for your biopic yet?

The working title has been Blood Harmony for a while, but that’s also another band name, a really cool band of sisters in country music.

I recall it was joked in my Ann interview that your biopic’s tagline should be “Sexism, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

That’s good. I like that! We’ll keep that one floating.

What details can you share about the upcoming documentary?

It’s about the band Heart, because Ann already put out a little Ann Wilson documentary by herself [In My Voice]. We were waiting for that to get done before we proceeded with the larger one — put the Heart train back on track for next year, mainly. Hopefully ‘27 and ’28 will be the year for Heart world domination, basically.

Well, right now you’re in the documentary If These Walls Could Rock, which focuses a lot on the 1980s, one of the decades that Heart dominated. You spent a lot of time at the Sunset Marquis in the ‘80s and beyond. You mentioned two albums, Fanatic and Red Velvet Car — didn’t Heart record those at the Sunset Marquis?

Yeah, we set up a little studio in one of the villas. We made our own studio there. … We worked there and also in the Nightbird studio [in the Sunset Marquis basement], and stayed there many, many, many, many, many times with our tour bus. At 4 or 5 in the morning, we’d park the tour bus under the hotel in the basement and just kind of roll off the bus and into our hotel rooms. It was really a home away from home. I loved how the [If These Walls Could Rock] documentary turned out, because it’s hysterical. When you see the stuff Billy Bob Thornton talks about, oh my God! I thought it was really cool to show just how much debauchery really was OK in those days. It was pretty standard operating procedure, how wild things could really get and how the [Sunset Marquis] really lived up to the standard of being a wild rock hotel.

I’m sure many people who watch If These Walls Could Rock will say, “Oh, it was a different time.” You and Ann were these nice Northwestern military daughters who got thrown into this crazy party scene. Was that daunting for you?

Well, in the arc of your life, you kind of go through your party stages, and that was our twenties and early thirties, so we were right down the center of Party Central. We were actually kind of lightweights compared to a lot of the people around us, because our work ethic was so ingrained from a military-type ethic that we had to show up on time. We were not going to be wasted before the show. … The party didn’t start before the show, like it did for a lot of people. We almost never missed one show ever, and we were always on time. We were a dream rock band to work with, promoter-wise, because we were professionals. But at the Sunset Marquis, we were not professional! We were doing all kinds of debauchery and getting away with it — and being protected inside of it. It was sort of a “no-tell motel” vibe, where you felt safe to push the envelope with the party thing.

One of the anecdotes you share in the film is that Rudolf Schenker from Scorpions called you up and asked you to party with him. Did you accept his invitation?

We would get a call back in the analog telephone days, with the cord-to-the wall kind of telephones where you could call from the lobby to a hotel room, so we’d always pick it up. And it’s like [German accent]: “Hullo, Nahncy! It’s Rudy from Scorpions! Vee are here now. Vee are in the lobby and vee are ready to pahrrty!” But we were like, “No, no, we can’t party right now,. We have to sleep because there’s a show tomorrow. It’s a school night for us.”

Nancy Wilson at the Sunset Marquis (photo courtesy of Bungalow Media + Entertainment)

Any other stories about crossing paths with interesting celebrities at the Marquis?

I got to make some beautiful eye contact, walking through the lobby once, with Jimmy Page. I’d met him a couple of times and made some other eye contact before, but usually in passing along the way. He’s one of my muses, one of my heroes, so it was so cool to just touch base, even if it was just eye contact. You saw a lot of Hollywood stars, a lot of actors. Billy Bob Thornton was always cruising around in there. Like he says in the documentary, “Between my divorces, I would just go live there. I wasn’t sure when to go home.” He kind of liked it there better, because it was a safe place away from the divorce situation for him. When I was in a sad space about getting separated and divorced, I came into my room and it was kind of the under-construction area of the hotel. I was upset, and Francois, the really kind bellman/concierge guy, saw the mood I was in. And he said, “No, no, no, no, no. This will not do for Nancy! Ms. Wilson will stay in a much nicer room! There will be no price difference. You will stay in this nicer, quieter part of the hotel.” Stuff like that that they did out of the goodness of their heart.

They knew me well enough to see what state I was in, even though I was trying not to be noticeable about it. They knew me well enough to go, “Wait one second. Hold on. Don’t take any bags off yet. We’ll get you a better room.” And it just meant the world to me, because I had to go on tour. I had to leave. It was separation anxiety, 100 percent, on every level — not just leaving town, but leaving a relationship, with kids involved and stuff like that. So, it was very meaningful that they treated me so kindly. The kindness thing is more important in the world than you might ever imagine, especially today in the climate we’re all trying to get through, live through, survive. The political climate in particular is so unkind. Kindness is the ethical way that the universe will need to bend towards, in the next cycle coming in. And I am such an optimist that I believe it will. I want to believe it will.

Didn’t Ann have some kind of medical emergency when she was staying at the Sunset Marquis, and the kind staff also took good care of her?

Yeah, she did. She had a little scare early in the morning. They just whisked her away to the emergency [room] and made sure everybody was not aware, so that it wouldn’t be a plague to her trying to get well from the situation she found herself surprised to be in.

When did this occur?

It was around early 2020s, 2016 or ‘15 or something like that, or 2010 maybe. It’s hard to recall, because she’s perfectly fine now. But it was just kind of a little surprise medical slip-up.

I’m glad they took good care of her then, and also glad to hear you say she’s doing well now, because obviously she had some serious health issues recently.

She’s doing well now. We just recorded the album, and she sounds amazing. We did 118 shows together, which were great. So, she’s fine. All of her medical stuff is completely sorted out nowadays, which is really a big victory, because she wasn’t sure for a while there, a couple of years back, if she wasn’t going to be taken by the big C. But her scans are fewer and farther between, because everything keeps on coming up clear. I think she actually beat it. You keep checking, but it keeps on getting more and more positive all the time.

And it’s really added a lot to her expressive way of singing these days. I think it’s my favorite Ann Wilson sound on this new album that I’ve maybe ever heard, because she’s always been so pyrotechnical-capable, she had no limits to what range and what kind of whizzing-around fireworks she could accomplish, but in her current state of play as a singer, it’s way more translatable. There’s a humanity and an expression to it now that’s much more fulfilling to listen to, I think, than all of the vocal pyrotechnics of the past. When you think of Ann, you think of almost like a banshee singer. She’s not a crooner now either, she still punches beautifully and she’s still got a range, but I think she just interprets stuff better, now that she’s been through such a lot of living. You really hear the pearls of wisdom in there now, more than they ever were. As a singer, she’s just more soulful these days.

Did Ann’s cancer bring you two closer together?

I do feel super-reconnected now. We kind of had a separation thing that took a little bit longer to get through than I ever wanted, but she needed to have her own independent stuff away from Heart. And it was good for me to have my own independent stuff away from Heart as well. So, now the reunion is really sweeter than ever. A lot of the drama that was kind of swirling has come to a halt.

You say Heart’s estrangement, or hiatus, or whatever you want to call it, was longer than you expected. I’m curious why that was, or why you thought that.

Well, after she got cancer, I wasn’t sure that I was needed, because she was so kind of closed-off about going through that. She had moved from Florida into a new place in Nashville, where she still lives now, and I’d never visited her in Florida because I really didn’t feel welcome there at all. And so, there was just a whole thing that had to kind of melt away. When she moved to the Nashville area, I could tell that she was happier where she was living. … She’s more of a city girl by nature.

Was it a gradual coming-together, organically, or was there a specific breakthrough moment when you sat down and hashed things out?

Well, we got back on the road together in 2019. Really, it was between 2016 and 2019 that things got kind of fubar: f***ed up beyond recognition. But then we got back out on the road, and it was like, “OK, this is like riding a bicycle.” There was still a lot of tension, but we kept on planning to keep going. It’s taken a while, but right now it couldn’t be better, because I just feel like Ann has kind of settled into who she’s becoming, where she gets to live now, and getting past all of the scary stuff with the cancer. She’s really exhaling enough to give energy and pay attention to our relationship again more. And I’m really happy about it, because when I got to Nashville to finish up some songwriting together that we’d been doing remotely with our collaborator, Sue Ennis, when we got in a room together it was like, “Oh, this is second nature. There’s no drama here.” It’s usually just the people around you that create the drama. There’s a lot of jealous little vendetta things that we couldn’t be bothered with anymore.

Did Ann’s health issues make you newly appreciate this rock ‘n’ roll dynasty that you two have built?

It completely did bring that to the surface of our relationship, because it was like, “Wow, we’ve done this for 50 years!” And pretty successfully, off and on — enough so that we’ve made an imprint where every rock show we play is like a singalong these days, which is really cool. It’s all about these songs. It’s what we were born to do, and do together. It’s what we’ve always done together, and it’s second nature. So, getting back into that with Ann one-on-one was extremely meaningful and really fulfilling for me. … It made me extremely happy to make this album.

And I’m extremely happy to hear that you and Ann have, for lack of a better term, made peace with your past. But changing the subject a bit, since so much If These Walls Could Rock focuses on the ‘80s, have you made peace with that period of your career? That was Heart’s most lucrative era, but you’ve had mixed feelings about it because you were pushed into this sort of hair-metal scene.

Yeah. I think there’s a lot of people that came into knowing about Heart at that time, and then they later discovered the ’70s version of Heart. The [‘80s] songs that still sound pretty timeless and little less dated are the ones we play live, like “Alone,” “These Dreams,” and “What About Love.” It was making the videos, mainly, that was the most challenging part of that decade for us — because it took the importance right off of the music itself and it slapped you in the center of a visual aspect. All these stylists would show up at the big soundstage with the camera crews and the smoke machines and the lighting and the dancers and all that other kind of stuff. It was so not exactly about the music anymore.

I mean, they made a molten-metal mold of your body in the “These Dreams” video…

Well, that’s definitely memorable! We’re still talking about it today. The gold mold, like the “golden goddess.” It was a big piece of Styrofoam, and in the Styrofoam they drew [my] shape and then carved [my] shape out. You go lay down in there after they spray-painted it. The culture itself had switched over from the late ’60s and the ’70s, where it was more mind-expanded with pot. … The drugs changed in the ’80s over to the cocaine era, so it was much more of an egocentric type of “me, me, me, me, me, me, me,” and all about how you looked. It was an egocentric drug time, instead of a mind-expanded drug time where everybody’s cool — even if you’re Mama Cass, even if you’re fat, that’s great. But not in the ’80s! Ann was “too fat” for the ’80s. That was really hard. It was pressurized. The glamorization in the ’80s was so high-pressure that they would stretch the [television] frame.

Yes, I think it was the “Never” music video where the image ratio was compressed, like squished narrower, presumably to make Ann look thinner.

And it was not lost on Ann, obviously. Emotionally, that was pretty tough for her, having just always been a big baby and a big-boned girl, always larger; some kids are born a little bit larger. Living through that made her more self-conscious and made it harder to stay on that diet. It was kind of a vicious cycle of attention on how she looked, instead of how the music sounded and what her talent really was all about. And they would stick me out the front because I was the “blonde bimbo.”

And they’d turn you into a golden-goddess statue.

Yeah, it was just a little shallow for our taste, because we were hippie chicks from the ’60s, basically.

Did the fact that record executives were pushing you more to the front create any friction or jealousy or rivalry between you and Ann? If I was in Ann’s shoes, it’d be hard not to resent that.

Yeah, it definitely hurt her feelings because she started the band; I was always going to be in the band, but I joined after I went to college a little bit first. And then I got kind of stuck up front, and they put her more behind me, like in photo shoots: “Bring the blonde forward. Hide the brunette behind the blonde!” That really hurt her feelings, and it hurt my feelings for her. It also hurt my feelings to be typecast in sort of a bimbo role that I’ve never felt described me at all. I’m not a space cadet. I studied a lot of things in university, poetic stuff. I don’t define myself by my looks at all. I’m a really competent musician, producer, and writer, and an OK singer. It hurt both of our feelings in very complex ways, to get through that image-making machinery of the ’80s that was kind of unfair to music.

Heart were never a hair-metal band, but you were on MTV when those bands were prominent, and during that time most of the women on MTV were the “video girls,” the girls in cages or whatever. I was laughing hysterically during this If These Walls Could Rock scene with Russell Mulcahy, who directed Rod Stewart’s decadent “Tonight I’m Yours” video by the Sunset Marquis pool. He has a laptop and he’s re-watching that video with all these fleshy party girls in bikinis, and he’s wincing, almost like, “I can’t watch this. Close the laptop! This is not my best work!” But that’s what was happening in the ‘80s, so it makes sense that MTV would treat you like you were video girls — even though you were actually the musicians.

That’s a really good way to frame it. We just felt like we were objectified and not appreciated for our talents at all. It had to be about the look. It was more of a Hollywood system: Churn out the hot chicks and make the dudes look like a lady. Everybody had the same blonde hair, the same hairdresser.

On the subject of hair, since we were talking about your pink tips at the start of this interview, and to take it back to If These Walls Could Rock, I understand you ruined many Sunset Marquis towels with your hair dye.

There’s so many anecdotes about the Sunset Marquis, but we really did go through a lot of towels! We ruined a lot of their towels and washcloths because of our hair color, all of the different hair colors, the purple, the fuchsia. There was every shade of red or orange. There was bright yellow. There was canary yellow for a while. Us and Cyndi Lauper [who also appears in If These Wals Could Rock] probably ruined a lot of towels.

And probably made the showers look like a scene from Psycho.

Yeah. “Something happened in that shower! What happened in there? Who bleeds purple blood anyway?”

Well, with all the other rock ‘n’ roll shenanigans going on at the Marquis, having to clean up bit of hair dye was probably the least of the staff’s worries! You mentioned the ‘60s/’70s marijuana era making way for the ‘80s cocaine era, but didn’t you once claim the hotel was haunted by a “pot ghost”?

Yes, in the main part of the hotel off the lobby where the elevator is… by the cheaper rooms, there was always a smell of pot. But there would be nobody there! There would be no sound. Most of the doors would be open and the maid would be cleaning, or there would be no people at all in there. And then once at the villa when we were recording with Ben Mink, recording Fanatic or Red Velvet Car, we were like, “Wait, is somebody smoking pot outside?” Our villa was all by itself, but there was still a pot ghost. Whoever that was, that ghost is still smoking pot to this day, I’m sure.

I wonder who it was? Which marijuana-smoking rock star that’s no longer with us would be mostly likely to haunt the Sunset Marquis?

Probably somebody like Jim Morrison.

That’s a good guess. Do you have any other memories of the hotel?

Well, I was thinking about it after I saw the documentary, that I never went in that pool! Not one time! Everyone else in the documentary went in the pool at least once, and some jumped from the balcony. But I never even went in the pool. I guess it was too public for me, and I’m too shy.

Did you go in the jacuzzi, though?

No! And I think it was a really good idea to not go in that particular hot tub.

This Q&A, which has been edited for brevity and clarity, originally appeared on Gold Derby. Watch Nancy Wilson’s full interview in the video at the top of this page. If These Walls Could Rock premieres Aug. 14 on Apple and Amazon.