I was pretty much a hippie. I was a vegetarian, gypsy-like. I liked to meditate, and it's curious because I was very much attracted to the possibility of change.
I don't care what you do, I just don't want to be a mud hippie like you. [From 1994 woodstock]
They gave it to us for about five bucks a week, and we just went there to live. Probably the first band that ever did that back then and it became the famous cottage.
I had a crazy life for a teenager. I lived in New Jersey, but I'd go to Vermont for three weeks, join a commune, take pictures with the guy I was dating, come back home, and post photos.
I'm trying to assemble materials for a different mode of life.
Living off the grid and being kind of an outlaw brings a dangerous reality.
I've always enjoyed the bohemia of Paisley.
I'm moving into a yurt in the woods near my parents' home in Vermont.
My kids and I live like three fun-loving hermits. We're quite bohemian.
Our crime was that we were beginning to live a new and contagious life-style without official authorization.
Once I knew the City very well, spent my attic days there, while others were being a lost generation in Paris, I fledged in San Francisco, climbed its hills. slept in its parks, worked on its docks, marched and shouted in its revolts~ It had been to me in the days of my poverty and it did not resent my temporary solvency.
I think everything everything about my lifestyle is fairly alternative. I gather my own spring water from mountains every month. I go to a farm to get my food. I make everything from my own toothpaste to my own body lotions and face oils. I could go on for hours. I make my own medicines; I don’t get those from doctors. I make my own cheese and forage wild foods and identify wild plants. It’s an entire lifestyle. It’s appealing to my soul.
I live a reasonably simple life, off the beaten track.
What I'm nostalgic for is the idea of an edge in New York. There used to be these fringes of the city where civilization sort of ended, and therefore young people could live cheaply, or open nightclubs or art galleries, or even squat. That fringe moved out to New Jersey and Brooklyn. The whole idea of the metropolis is the centralization of like-minded souls, and when the central real estate becomes too expensive, the dreamers, the young poets, and the artists will go elsewhere.
I kind of grew up in a commune, but it wasn't a hippie commune necessarily, but it was a big house with a lot of families, we all lived together and it was the 70s, whatever that means.
There were many things I could do for two or three days and earn enough money to live on for the rest of the month. By temperament I'm a vagabond and a tramp.
Money wasn't important to me. Once I discovered music, I was quite happy to live as a bum. As long as I had my music and my band, I was happy.
My lifestyle is bizarre, but the only thing you need to know is where the darkroom is.
Going underground is no answer. What kind of world would they come up to? What would they use for air? What would they use for food? ... What would they use for people?
Reacting to Federal civil defense suggestions of building underground fallout shelters:
I had rather live with cheese and garlic in a windmill.
I live in Mexico in the wintertime, and I live off the grid down there.
Eyeing the traffic circulating the lobby hung with bad art. Big invasive stuff unloaded on Stanley Bard in exchange for rent. The hotel is an energetic, desperate haven for scores of gifted hustling children from every rung of the ladder. Guitar bums and stoned-out beauties in Victorian dresses. Junkie poets, playwrights, broke-down filmmakers, and French actors. Everybody passing through here is somebody, if not in the outside world.
When I look back at my past and the way I grew up, I grew up on communes. That was meant to be.
I have a whole different type of lifestyle.
I refuse to live a conventional life.