Tag: Oral History

Rikers – Quotes from Oral History

TAMI LEE, retired correction officer, 1989 to 2020: I never smiled for thirty years. I never smiled at that job one time. Sometimes I’d have to think about it—like, “Smile.” I didn’t want to smile so they could think I was playing with them because I was not playing with them.

CASIMIRO TORRES, detained various stints, 1980s to 2000s: I had a girl one time, I used to go to this twenty-four-hour store after I came out of prison, late at night, and after a few times she started calling me Smiley. I said, “Why do you call me that?” And she said, “Because you’ve never smiled.” And it had never occurred to me that I hadn’t smiled in years and years. I had my prison face on wherever I went. It’s something that clings to you, like the smell of shit. You have to really wash it off.

ANNA GRISTINA, detained 2012: I was in the bullpen, waiting at the processing area. There was a woman. These girls were going, “She needs to get to the doctor. She’s shaking on the floor.” A couple minutes later, everyone is screaming. The guards, they are having their lunch. This sergeant with braids, she says, “Shut the fuck up! Mind your own business!”

We were looking and we saw this woman from across the pen, froth coming out of her mouth. She’s having a seizure. She’s vomiting foam. The guard says, “Mind your business. You’re in enough trouble. Keep your mouth shut.” We came back from a lawyer visit, and they had taken her out on a gurney, dead. The guards had denied her medical, and she died. I don’t know her name or her age.

She [the woman who died] had covers over her body when they took her out. She had been screaming for hours for help. She had been half the day in the holding pen with no water, no nothing, having seizures. I’ll never forget the feeling of telling my lawyers a woman died in there and they shrugged their shoulders.

JERRY DEAN, detained 1987, 2003: The last day I was leaving Rikers when I was sixteen, I sat in the corner, they drive me upstate [to the Goshen Secure Center], and I remember somebody said, when you leave Rikers, don’t ever look back, don’t look back in the car or the bus, or else you’ll come back. So I didn’t want to look back.

Rikers: An Oral History
Graham Rayman, Reuven Blau

Oral History: How The Go-Go’s Perfected Pop-Punk : NPR

BC: Jane and I lived in a punk rock apartment building in Hollywood called the Canterbury. It was like the Chelsea hotel in New York, that kind of thing. I loved all the different clubs in L.A.: you’d go to the Whisky, drive down to the Starwood, see a band there, go downtown to Chinatown to Madame Wong’s, see someone there, go to an afterparty in Hollywood, play music there — it was a really lively, creative time in Los Angeles.

AB: I was at their first show at the Masque. They played with my drummer, Terry Graham. Everybody was really impressed. Even though they were just starting to play, you could tell they had songwriting ability: They had a song about living at the Canterbury, and fighting off the roaches, and they had “Robert Hilburn,” [an unflattering portrait of the L.A. Times pop critic]. People remembered their clever lyrics, that they had cool melodies. They had something special even at that first show.

How The Go-Go’s Perfected Pop-Punk
Hilary Hughes
NPR

I Want My MTV

STEWART COPELAND: In those days, the band had to look the part. Your haircuts and sartorial choices were very much a part of the product. And, led by Sting, we were good at it. We would tease Stingo that he couldn’t walk past a mirror without primping. And he would say, “Fuck off, it’s my job. And yours, too, by the way.”

MARTIN FRY: The record companies weren’t pressuring anyone to look a certain way. That came later. For “The Look of Love” we wanted to cross the visual style of Benny Hill, a really crude slapstick comedian, with An American in Paris. I don’t think Kurt Cobain would have ever put on a striped blazer and sung to a wooden crocodile. There’s a parrot on my shoulder at one point. We were pushing it to the limit, seeing how embarrassed we could get. Art is what you get away with.

JOE ELLIOTT: Rock of Ages was a laugh. I wield this giant prop sword through fiery hallways and then the sword magically turns into a guitar. It’s very Spinal Tap. When I sang ‘All-right,” which sounded a bit like “Owl-right,” Mallet put an owl in the video at that moment.

BRIAN SETZER: My hair was my speciality. If you don’t have cool hair, don’t make a video.