Nick Cave Proclaims He Measures Up to Rock's Greats -- Especially Physically

It's not quite 10 a.m. when Nick Cave shows up in the lobby of L.A.'s trendy Roosevelt Hotel. While the early hour is impressive enough given that Cave headlined the Hollywood Bowl the night before, the Australian auteur has been up writing since six. It's all part of the workmanlike approach the 50-year-old Cave -- who's earned the best reviews of his storied career for this year's 'Dig, Lazarus, Dig' album -- takes to his work, traveling to an office every day to write. If it sounds surprisingly disciplined, don't worry, Nick Cave is still every bit the wild rock 'n' roll star that music could use more of.

And it makes for one hell of an entertaining and controversial interview as Cave talks about everything from how he knows he is more well-endowed than Jim Morrison to the craft of songwriting to why a sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll phase might not be the worst thing for young people.

Congratulations on the show last night.

Oh, yeah?

You said in the L.A. Times you wanted to rip the audience's heads off. Did you feel like you did that?

Well, we were told by various people that it's a notoriously difficult venue, that it's very difficult to engage with the audience because of various different reasons; the way the whole thing is set up, the way the bulk of the people are a million miles away, you're playing to people drinking and eating cheese and biscuits and all that sort of s---. So, we didn't discuss this, but I certainly felt that it was necessary to take certain steps to involve the audience. And I mean it seemed like the personnel at the Hollywood Bowl were making every attempt to disallow any real interaction between the audience and the performance.

Well, it's normally a very proper place. And I loved the version of 'Stagger Lee' at the end, though I have to guess you are the first person since Jim Morrison to simulate getting oral sex on the Bowl stage.

Well, I was gonna pull my d--- out but because I know for a fact mine is a lot larger than Jim Morrison's, but I thought, "I'll let history stand."

How do you know for certain it's larger than Morrison's?

Well, you can tell by his stature. You can tell by the size of his hands.

It is interesting though because Radiohead and Beck just played the Bowl and you definitely won't see either one of them delivering the same carnal feeling of last night. And it got me wondering when rock got so asexual.

Absolutely. It got old; these aren't young people doing these shows, and what happened, I guess, for a lot of these people was they felt that the only way to survive their autumn years was to get dignified and to bring a certain wisdom and dignity onto stage. And so you don't kind of grind your crotch into the face of a young girl if you're gonna try and put that across. And there are a couple of records where I was trying to write a certain kind of song that was around the ballad and the big love ballad. It felt important for me to write that kind of thing. At the same time it created certain kind of shows that were very safe and had a certain amount of dignity to them and then at some point we just thought, "F---, this is kind of getting really boring, we'll leave that to Sting" [laughs]. Then Grinderman came out of that, and now we're, like, 50 years old and it's just not really appropriate, but we're really enjoying that aspect of it.

But it worked last night. And while you say it got old, the only guys left that are still doing it are guys like you, Steven Tyler, Greg Dulli. It's actually the young artists that aren't doing it at all. And I understand where the drugs came out of rock 'n' roll ...

Well, I don't understand that, either.

The drugs, you mean?

Yeah, that they came out of rock 'n' roll?

Well, growing up there was the creed of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.

Well, that's a bummer.

That it doesn't exist anymore?

Yeah. It's an essential part of the whole thing. I mean, it's different for me. I've been through many years of it, actually. But you see some of these young bands and you're going backstage and stuff like that with them sometimes, and it's so kind of you just think, "What the f---'s going on here?" Everyone's sitting around and looking after their health and talking about politics and business savvy. But for us, I guess, we listen to a lot of blues music, and the carnal aspect of blues music is just there; there's no white neuroses about it, no discomfort about it, it's just there. And it's the kind of music we're built to play.

You mention writing the big love ballad, and I saw where you said you wrote 'Into Your Arms' sick in a hotel room, and I've now been to multiple weddings where that's been played.

Well, for me, there's a certain prophetic nature to the way that I write songs. And I don't mean that in the way that it actually sounds. What I mean to say is that very often I'm writing songs about what I need and not really what I have, and that goes both ways. Some of my most violent, misogynistic, disturbed songs have been written when I'm my most secure and comfortable. I think for me my songs have always been personal demands. I don't realize what they are at the time and sometimes I think, "Where did that come from?" But they're usually trying to tell me something; they're usually in fact more in the know that I am.

For me, as a writer, I got jealous of a few lines on 'Dig, Lazarus, Dig,' especially 'The saxophone laid down a litany of excuses' in 'Hold On to Myself.'

Well, good. That's my ambition, to make other writers jealous. I know that feeling when you read something by someone else and go, "F---. That is really good."

Who inspires that feeling in you?

There are certain writers that write in an intuitive way that because they write in that way achieves something I will never be able to achieve. You listen to my lyrics and read my writing, you get the feeling it's been real considered. I've always known that if I'm gonna do what I do, I have to sit down and do it. To wait for songs to come, it's too stressful, it's too painful and unnecessary. You can get to a point, which I feel I've been at for quite a long time, you don't even have good days and bad days, you just write and you write a certain amount a day, and that's the end of it. But that's something I've managed to do at 50 years old, be able to circumvent the completely fruitless pain of the actual writing.

I was talking to Jason from Spiritualized, and he'd been through a period where he didn't do anything. I'm saying, "What happened? Did you break your f---ing hand?" And he's saying, "The songs didn't come." I'm like, "What do you mean the f--ing songs didn't come?" To me, that didn't make any sense. Here's the guy who's a great musician, a great lyric writer, who's actually just sort of sitting around, hoping that a song is going to come down and attach itself to him in some way, or a melody's gonna come into his head. And it struck me that there are a lot of writers that actually that's the way that they work, and they have great periods and other periods they don't have so much, and their involvement in the whole thing is not that important, really. On the one hand, I was incredibly impressed by that, but on the other hand I thought for me I could never just sit around for eight years and think, "I wish a song could come" [laughs].

We were talking earlier about how the sex and drugs have gone out of rock 'n' roll.

The rock 'n' roll's gone out, as well [laughs].

We might see some aged rock stars then. I was reading in an interview you gave to Radar where you joked it was the heroin that kept you looking so young, and while you were joking, you might be on to something. Look at you, Iggy Pop -- Jim Carroll is another one.

Well, we were pickled. There's a school of thought that [William] Burroughs talks about where each time you withdraw from drugs your cells die and when you come off the drugs they regenerate and there's this constant dying and being brought back to life that's a constant part of a junkie's experience and that keeps you looking young. Although Burroughs looked like s--- [laughs]. But drinking doesn't do that; drinking just hits you like a freight train and there's no way around it.

So, in that respect, drugs are better for youthful appearances.

Yeah, heroin, if you're gonna stay young. Well, look, I'm not advocating anyone go one out and do that drug, obviously, because you can die from it, but you can also rebound from it very easily. Some of those f---ing drugs you take long enough, you just don't come back.

I don't want to romanticize it, but certainly it has inspired some great art.

The way I feel about it, my kids, they're 17. I hope they're out there listening to rock 'n' roll, taking drugs, and f---ing a different woman every night and all of that sort of stuff. I hope they're having a good time. There's plenty of ---ing time for all the rest of it. I don't want them to die in the process, but I want them to be able to step outside of what you're legally allowed to do for one thing and experience life in those terms, it's absolutely f---ing essential.

I think absolutely kids have to make their own mistakes.

I don't even think they're mistakes. I think you just gotta f--- up. I don't think you gotta make mistakes. It's the oldest story in the book, but everyone's telling you what to do. Everyone's telling you, "You gotta do this, you can't f---ing smoke here, you can't do this." In America it's chronic; there are more and more restrictions and rules and policies. And I just think it's sad for kids.

Rock 'n' roll is supposed to be about rebellion, and you're saying there is so much to rebel against.

There is loads to rebel against.

So why is there no more rock 'n' roll, then?

Maybe because you're not allowed to smoke indoors anymore [laughs].