SCHIZO 

Part 2

Janis never quite reached the death zone summit of megalomania. But she did call herself the greatest chick blues singer in the world. On a good day. On another day, she would echo Lennon: “Nobody really loves me, NOBODY.” She never forgot being called the Pig Girl of Port Arthur Texas, or being voted “the ugliest guy on campus” at college. In spite of the later public adulation, she told an interviewer: “If they know anything about anything, they know I’m not a star. They know I’m a middle-age chick with a drinking problem, man, and a loud voice… I’ll never be a star like Jimi Hendrix or Bob Dylan.”

But Hendrix was no less schizo about himself than Janis or the others. “I’m going to be the greatest,” he declared, but attempted suicide twice when he feared he wasn’t. An His old Chambers Brothers’ bandmate remarked on how fame made Jimi “a changed man… he wanted everyone’s attention in the whole world.” The Experience’s bassist wrote of how he wanted to scream at Jimi on stage, “Stop being a star and play the guitar!” Sang Jimi, I used to live in a room full of mirrors. All I could see was me.

And then there was the Doors Lizard King who regarded himself as a latter day Alexander the Great and Neitzsche’s Superman. “We’re universally despised and I kinda relish the whole situation,” he said. “Why? We’re on a monstrous ego trip, and people resent it. They hate us because we’re so good.” But a friend spoke of Morrison’s “great periods of insecurity where he’d feel he was a fraud.” And the Door’s guitarist, Robbie Krieger, recalled the nights when he and the others had to talk him out of suicide. 

Cobain called himself  “an untouchable boy genius.” But “he felt unworthy of the international attention lavished on him,“ said a friend. Added his publicist: “People are treating him like God, and that pisses him off.” 

Jerry Garcia agreed. When asked about the worshipful Deadheads, he said: “I’ll put up with it until they come at me with the cross and nails.” Garcia was the anti-star. He hated ego trips. ‘I’m just a guitar player,” he kept insisting. He knew he was good at it, but added: “I feel like someone who is constantly on the verge of losing it, or blowing it. I feel tremendously insecure.”

Even at the peak of his stardom, Garcia remained firm in his belief: “No matter who you are, you know yourself for the asshole you are.”