Lock up your daughters15 years is a lot of water under the bridge, and if you can do a little math, it's also the exact amount of time that has elapsed between Guyville and, well, Guyville's reissuing. In the interim Phair has released a set of disappointing-to-controversial records, most recently the slick Matrix-assisted pop-jobs Liz Phair and Somebody's Miracle. As Trucks notes, despite these blatant grabs at elusive commercial success - no value judgment intended on my part; in fact, I found Phair's contemporaneous statements regarding the need for financial security refreshing - Liz has pretty much presented each of the four intervening records as "some seemingly new awakening." So, his point, as an unabashed Exile partisan, is "which is it?" (Not to mention the inherent self-serving contradiction in claiming a new peak in creative fecundity while hawking essentially 15 year old wares.)
Trucks opens his piece alluding to the tensions that develop between him and Phair once he broaches this delicate point:
...she probably gets the gist of my feelings, because once I ask the question about her return to creativity (despite her hailing each interim release as some seemingly new awakening), both of our voices rise in volume. Our words become harder-edged. So, Liz Phair's kind of screaming at me. But she then changes course, adopting a tone of voice that probably was not in her arsenal until she became a mother: a sort of "Now, you are going to eat your peas, aren't you?" approach. I also take a different tact, speaking very, very quietly, as though I am a flight attendant attempting to keep an unruly passenger calm until the plane lands so the authorities can deal with her. Which, admittedly, is not a good thing.After tendering this juicy tidbit in what can only be called a verbal trailer for the actual interview (Liz Phair's peeved at me! We reach an uneasy truce! She hugs me before speeding away in a taxi cab!), Trucks proceeds to unspool the exchange as merely a series of discrete Phair quotes, presumably representative and presumably in some working narrative order. Here is the aforementioned contentious exchange, as published, in its entirety:
"OK, now listen. This probably sounds hollow coming from people who get written about, but it's true: You cannot look at an interview, or pages on . . . a piece of paper, an interview, and freak out about it. Like, you can't look at what a politician says in one context and freak out about it. We love to do that. We love to be like: 'Oh, my God. So everything that you've done now has not been creative . . .' ""I mean, I'm not going to get upset about it, but I think that you're being a little overreactive about it."
"Just a second. The tone in this room has gone antagonistic."
"Rod Stewart—I mean, he used to make, like, brilliant music, right? And then he kind of went the whole celebrity route, and he stopped making brilliant music. But I wasn't mad at him. [Laughs] I didn't go, like: 'You fuckhead! You fuckwit!' Like, I don't get that. Like, I don't get people . . . Like, I just stopped buying records, which to me is the appropriate response."
"You've asked me to accept responsibility for one dumb line in a Billboard interview. It's a fucking interview in a magazine."
"Get mad at the record. Throw it across the room. Get really angry at it. Step on it. Burn it. You can do whatever you want. But, like, it is unhealthy for someone to assume that they know someone, or have any . . . when they don't know me. That's just inappropriate."
"Honestly, my boyfriend said something like this to me at Valentine's Day. He's like: 'You can't say what you say in interviews. You have to say this, that, and the other thing, because it's coming across really badly.' Something about Guyville—I can't remember what it was. See, I didn't even really take it in. I was just so affronted that it was Valentine's Day, and he was taking that moment to critique my interviewing. But I can promise you: I will never learn this lesson. I will stick my foot in my mouth until I die. That's just who I'm going to be."
"Do you think that the person who would know what to tell you in an interview could write Exile in Guyville? Do you think the person who would know how to send a polished image out into the world would fucking write that thing?"
"I'm a messy, crazy, do-what-I- fucking-want pain in the ass. And, like, I will be forever. And hopefully, one of these days, I'll do something that people are grateful for again. But, like, I cannot be two things—I cannot be this polished person that does what's right and does what I'm supposed to that'll make everyone feel good, and do the work that says 'Fuck you!' with the double guns."
"See, a polished persona would not let you take a picture of her in a bathrobe, but I'm willing."
Now I wouldn't argue that this is uninteresting; nor would I argue that it's incomprehensible. (Unlike the seemingly apropos-of-nothing: "But you're wrong. Because I was . . . does that come across as aggressive? Let me try it again. Well, actually . . . [laughs]," followed by, "You're totally wrong—100 percent. And I have to tell you, you're wrong about that other thing, too, but we'll get back to that.") But I would argue that it's terribly unfair to Phair, who emerges from her bout with a shadow opponent looking flighty, discombobulated, and slightly childish. Trucks, who is apparently asking some provocative questions, to say the least, remains silent throughout; we the readers have no idea what prompted these reactions from Phair. It could be that we would be in total concert with Truck's line of attack, as established by his "whoa, whoa...just wait a gosh-darn minute!" introduction. He overtly states that he had to talk Phair down in order to diffuse the tension, speaking "as though I am a flight attendant attempting to keep an unruly passenger calm until the plane lands so the authorities can deal with her," but we have no confirmation in the actual record of this. What we do get is a (perhaps inadvertently) biased portrayal of Phair as that unruly passenger.
Like I said, Trucks is generally an incisive, insightful writer, so I'm loathe to blame him. I also believe, in the absence of mitigating evidence, that the interview went down as he described it. Still, it's a shame that when we're ostensibly celebrating a feminist landmark in rock music - wherein even fifteen years later the "blowjob queens" are largely still looking up at the stage instead of on it - what we get is little more than shock puppeteering: crazy Lizzy and her dirty mouth, pull the string and see what comes out next. This interview reads as much like a fair exchange as Goya's "The Third of May, 1808" reads like a fair fight.
