{"id":3794,"date":"2012-08-14T09:56:08","date_gmt":"2012-08-14T13:56:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/wpblog\/?p=3794"},"modified":"2012-08-23T09:54:19","modified_gmt":"2012-08-23T13:54:19","slug":"the-perfect-interview-the-ali-warhol-tapes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/the-perfect-interview-the-ali-warhol-tapes\/","title":{"rendered":"No Contest: The Ali-Warhol Tapes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Victor Bockris:\u00a0 On the other hand, you always said you just like to have people who talk a lot when you turn the tape recorder on.<\/p>\n

Andy Warhol:\u00a0 Well, listen, that’s the thing.\u00a0 I mean, God! That’s your interview.\u00a0 I didn’t get one word in, so that was the ultimate.\u00a0 It was the perfect interview.\u00a0 The nice thing is that he lets everybody come up, which is kind of great.<\/p>\n

\u2014In a limousine, leaving Muhammad Ali’s training camp, Deerlake, Pennsylvania, August 15, 1977<\/em><\/p>\n

Back in that peak year of the punk ’70s, 1977, I introduced two punk godfathers, Andy Warhol and Muhammad Ali.\u00a0 The world heavyweight champion of art had been commissioned to paint a portrait of the World Heavyweight Champion of boxing.\u00a0 In 1974, I wrote a short book about life at Ali’s training camp, Fighter’s Heaven<\/em>.\u00a0 In 1977, I had just started working for Warhol at his Factory.\u00a0 In fact, traveling with Andy from New York to Deerlake, Pennsylvania, to act as a buffer between him and Ali was my first assignment.<\/p>\n

At the time, Ali and Warhol had so much in common that I had written in an article that was published one month earlier, “Who Does Andy Warhol Remind You of Most?\u00a0 Muhammad Ali,”\u00a0 They both came to prominence in 1964.\u00a0 Ali, who had beat Sonny Liston for the heavyweight title, showed a propensity for putting his mouth and face to good use for publicity.\u00a0 Warhol, who beat Jackson Pollock for the unacknowledged heavyweight title of the most famous painter, also showed the same propensity.<\/p>\n

Each man came from poverty (although Warhol had been ten times poorer than Ali) and eventually transformed his profession into a multimillion-dollar-a-year industry.\u00a0 Each became an icon.\u00a0 After catastrophic setbacks (Ali barred from boxing in 1967, Warhol shot in 1968), however, both made remarkable comebacks in the 1970s, becoming international superstars and multimillionaires.\u00a0 Motivated by money, these two men made it their language, but they did it with a humorous, philosophic twist.<\/p>\n

By 1977, Ali and Warhol faced career crises.\u00a0 Though holding their own, they were shadows of what they had been in their prime.\u00a0 Warhol had one vital attribute Ali was missing: He drew a sharp head on other people that he put to good use.\u00a0 Ali was so fixated on his own greatness that he often exercised poor judgment about other people.\u00a0 When the two men met in 1977, Warhol had regained much of the strength he lost after the 1968 attempt on his life, and he made the remainder of the 1970s a productive and successful time.\u00a0 Ali, on the other hand, was skidding downhill dangerously fast.\u00a0 Warhol was a smart businessman who maintained control over every aspect of his work.\u00a0 Ali had less control of his life and career.\u00a0 Capable of generating an enormous amount of money in a short time, mostly in cash, he attracted all the creeps, parasites and criminals in the country who could worm their way into his entourage.<\/p>\n

It was not until I sat down to write this piece, re-listening to the tapes I recorded that day in light of the information we have since received about the brain damage Ali suffered in the latter half of the ’70s, that I began to see and understand what really happened in the meeting between these two men.<\/p>\n

On the surface, the sole purpose of their meeting was to make money.\u00a0 A New York businessman, Richard Weissman, had contracted Warhol to do a series of portraits, “The Ten Greatest Athletes.”\u00a0 The product would consist of six copies of each forty-by-forty-inch silk-screened portrait (acrylic on canvas) and five hundred prints of each image.\u00a0 In exchange, Warhol was to be paid one million dollars.\u00a0 Each athlete was paid fifteen thousand dollars to let Andy take as many Polaroids of them as he needed to find the right image to be silk-screened onto canvas as the basis of their portrait.\u00a0 They would also receive one of the six commissioned paintings, valued at twenty-five thousand dollars each.<\/p>\n

On the ten to fifteen occasions I visited Fighter’s Heaven between 1972 and 1974, I saw the many moods of Muhammad Ali.\u00a0 At times he was the most infectiously happy person I had ever met.\u00a0 Being with him was sheer joy, whether we were barreling down the highway in his touring bus with Ali at the wheel, watching a video of one of his fights as he flicked punches past my ear, or tape-recording one of his supersonic raps.\u00a0 On other occasions, he could be withdrawn and appear badly troubled.\u00a0 Once, I saw him call for a handgun and fire a salvo of shots into the woods below the camp in what appeared to be a pent-up Elvis-like rage.\u00a0 But whatever his mood, once I got him talking about or reciting his poetry, Ali’s troubles seemed to blow away.\u00a0\u00a0 He had some quiet, serene scene at the center of his being that kept him balanced throughout the constant tumult of his existence then.\u00a0 I was not prepared, however, for the way he treated Andy Warhol.<\/p>\n

We arrived at the camp for our appointment at exactly 10 am, Thursday, August 15, 1977.\u00a0 Ali had flown in from Europe the night before and was a little behind schedule, an aide explained.\u00a0 At 10:45, clad from the head to foot in black, Ali stepped out of the log cabin he slept in while he was training and joined us in the camp’s courtyard, delineated by the kitchen, the gym and a beautiful panoramic view of the Pennsylvania countryside.\u00a0 The aide introduced Ali to Warhol, but Ali appeared to be elsewhere.\u00a0 Studiously staring at the bright blue, empty sky, he barely proffered a curled paw for Warhol to shake.\u00a0 The atmosphere was tense.\u00a0 As the party moved toward the gym where the photo session was set up, I welded myself to Ali’s side, aiming to be a go-between as the need arose.\u00a0 Ali was clearly sluggish.\u00a0 He had just completed a two-week publicity tour of thirteen European cities and was scheduled to start training for what would be a hard fight against Earnie Shavers immediately after our visit.<\/p>\n

As we walked, he started unraveling a surreal account of his recent travels:\u00a0 He told me that he’d just been in Gottenberg, Sweden, talking to twenty-three thousand people, “They paid me twenty thousand dollars for four hours.”\u00a0 The mounted police had to rescue him from the crowds in Sweden by putting him on a horse.\u00a0 The people of South Africa had sent a representative to thirteen cities across Europe looking for him to beg him to be their leader; all the archbishops in England wanted him to preach in their churches; twenty thousand people mobbed him at the houses of Parliament; and the London blacks begged him to lead them in their summer riots: “Fifteen minutes after I told them ‘No,’ in my suite at the Hilton,” he laughed, “they were over in Notting Hill fighting the police.\u00a0 I can’t be responsible for starting no trouble in somebody else’s country\u2026”<\/p>\n

We passed through Ali’s dressing room, where his trunks, jock strap, shoes, socks and boxing gloves were laid out for the afternoon’s sparring session, and entered the gym.\u00a0 Ali slumped onto a folding metal chair that had been set up in front of a white backdrop for the photo session.\u00a0 Normally, it is at this stage that the subject and artist begin to relate.\u00a0 But Ali continued to behave as if Andy Warhol were not there.<\/p>\n

I crouched down on the floor, five feet away, so as to stay out of the camera’s range but be close enough to continue a conversation.\u00a0 Now Ali started going into overdrive, talking about how he’d only realized on this trip how famous he really was and how many people wanted to see him.\u00a0 Meanwhile, Warhol was snapping a lot of useless profiles of Ali talking, but however hard I tried, I could not stop Ali’s monologue or redirect his attention away from me and toward Warhol.\u00a0 Then, suddenly, Ali gave us an opening.\u00a0 “How much are these paintings gonna sell for?” he asked.<\/p>\n

“Twenty-five thousand dollars,” answered Warhol’s business manager, the snappily dressed, sleek Fred Hughes.\u00a0 “Can you turn yourself a little bit towards the camera, champ?”<\/p>\n

The answer arrested Ali’s flow of thought.\u00a0 “Who in the world could they get to pay twenty-five thousand dollars for a picture?” he asked incredulously, almost levitating from his seat.<\/p>\n

“He’s sold quite a few for more than that!” Hughes replied, whispering, “We should have brought down one of Andy’s black drag queens.\u00a0 They went for twenty-eight thousand dollars each.”\u00a0 But Ali was buried in the equation.\u00a0 Launching into a rap about God, he concluded that, “Man is more attractive than anything else!” and then turned our attention fully onto him.\u00a0 “Look at me!\u00a0 White people gonna pay twenty-five thousand dollars for my picture!\u00a0 This little Negro from Kentucky couldn’t buy a fifteen hundred-dollar motorcycle a few years ago and now they pay twenty-five thousand dollars for my picture!”<\/p>\n

Although Ali was not willing to share any of the credit for this remarkable state of affairs with the artist, the exchange broke the ice, and soon Warhol uttered his line of the day: “Could we, uh, do some, uh, pictures where you’re not, uh, talking?”\u00a0 he asked, in the brittle, querulous voice he reserved for just such occasions.\u00a0 For a split second, there was a white light of silence in the room.\u00a0 Nobody had ever told the champ to shut his famous mouth in quite such a not-to-be-trifled-with way.\u00a0 Even I was not sure what this turn of events might portend.\u00a0 But then Ali broke into the silence, chuckling quietly to himself, “I’m sorry, I should be doing your job.\u00a0 You paying me.”\u00a0 Instantly becoming the professional, he flipped through a series of classic poses.<\/p>\n

Andy leapt into the moment, egging him on, “Just like that\u2026That’s really good\u2026Just a couple more.”<\/p>\n

“I wish you could take pictures in five weeks when I get more trim.\u00a0 A little more prettier,” Ali griped, pinching a tire of flesh around his belly.<\/p>\n

“Just three more,” Andy urged.\u00a0 “Could you put both fists close to your face?”<\/p>\n

“How about this!”\u00a0 Ali exclaimed, bringing his fists up into the classic boxing position, just in front of and below his chin.<\/p>\n

“That’s great!” Andy chimed.\u00a0 “Closer to your face\u2026more\u2026”<\/p>\n

“Do I look fearless?” Ali growled.<\/p>\n

“Very fearless,” Andy replied.\u00a0 “That’s fantastic!”<\/p>\n

Warhol’s strongest suit as a portrait painter was making people feel and look fabulous by focusing all his powerfully seductive attention on them.\u00a0 In those three minutes, Andy had restored Ali to the generous, fun-living host that I had met in 1972.\u00a0 Waving aside aides who were about to escort us out, now that our job was done, Ali announced that he wanted to show Andy around his camp, introduce him to his wife, take a look at the brand new mosque he had just built.<\/p>\n

I was delighted by the turn of events and began looking for an opportunity to record some quotable conversation between the two icons.\u00a0 As the rapid tour neared its end, Ali signaled another stop, inviting us to join him in his log cabin to listen to him read a poem he’d written the night before on the Concorde.\u00a0 I found myself striding between them on a narrow path that ran alongside the gym.\u00a0 Ali had jut starred in the biopic The Greatest<\/em>, which had been a resounding flop.\u00a0 Warhol was about to release what would turn out to be his last film, Bad<\/em>.\u00a0 Perhaps this was grounds for a conversation.\u00a0 “Well, you know,” I began, “Ali’s interested in getting into films, Andy, and you make films, so maybe\u2026” but before I could finish the sentence, a horrified Warhol peeled away mumbling something about “checking on the photographs.”\u00a0 Without breaking stride, Ali launched into a tirade on blaxploitation films: “Blacula<\/em>! Cotton Comes to Harlem! Nigger Charlie!<\/em> He snorted.\u00a0 “I predict they ain’t never going to make a real black movie.”\u00a0 Despite my faux pas, and the uneasy revelation that tension still lurked beneath the surface, I followed Ali into the cabin, where we were joined minutes later by Warhol and Hughes.<\/p>\n

Inside, the single room was virtually empty.\u00a0 A large gold-framed four-posted bed, which Ali told us cost eleven thousand dollars, stood in one corner.\u00a0 Ali sat in the opposite corner in an armchair.\u00a0 Warhol perched on a small hardback wooden chair facing Ali across a low-slung coffee table.\u00a0 I crouched on the floor to Warhol’s right, looking up at Ali.\u00a0 Hughes hung onto one corner of the bed.\u00a0 None of us had slept much the previous night.<\/p>\n

As Ali read his poem about the Concorde, I marveled that we were recreating the very setting that had proved so productive for me, interviewing Ali over the years.\u00a0 Once you had shown interest in his poems, he was much easier to interview.\u00a0 I switched on my tape recorder.<\/p>\n

As soon as Ali finished the poem and we had murmured our appreciation, a brief silence fell upon the room.\u00a0 In retrospect, if I had leapt in and started interviewing Ali, I might have been able to avert the onslaught that was to come.\u00a0 However, I made the mistake of thinking that Andy, in the catbird seat, would pick up the slack.\u00a0 But then Andy was the master of not picking up the slack.\u00a0 I noticed with mounting concern that Ali’s big hand was fishing into one of three wide open briefcases at his side while his eyes trained relentlessly on Andy’s face.\u00a0 Then his hand came up out of the bag clutching a thick stack of index cards held together by a rubber band.\u00a0 As I knew from experience, this meant that Ali was going to deliver a lecture of the kind he had frequently given on college campuses during the 1960s and now reserved for visitors he deemed worthy of their content, like George Plimpton or Norman Mailer.<\/p>\n

It turned out that Ali had a much better idea of who Andy Warhol was than I had credited him with, and that he was determined to make use of the meeting by delivering an important message to him.\u00a0 Over the next forty-five minutes, Ali segued back and forth between two lectures whose titles, “The Real Cause of Man’s Distress” and “Friendship,” might just as well have been plucked from the contents page of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol<\/em>\u00a0 (Harcourt Brace, 1975).\u00a0 (I have presented his words exactly as he said them, because Ali made a point of thanking me for doing that in a big interview I published with him in Penthouse<\/em>, and because Warhol taught me that if you did an interview and just let the subject talk about whatever they wanted, however they wanted, that would make the most accurate, revealing word portrait of them.\u00a0 (Warhol was not alone in his theory.\u00a0 The renowned British writer Havelock Ellis wrote in his introduction to Eckerman’s Conversations with Goethe<\/em> that the interviewer’s job is “to represent the man’s speech as the transparent veil which reveals his personality, so that we are conscious not of a mere succession of opinions on a flat surface but a living, complex person moving in his own three-dimensional space.”) )\u00a0 Ali started to talk straight at Andy in a way I had never seen Warhol sit still for before.<\/p>\n

You’re a man of wisdom and you travel a lot, so you can pass on some of the things I say.\u00a0 See, I’m gonna give you the kindergarten A B C thing.\u00a0 I’m gonna give you a lecture on Friendship and I’m telling you, go out and tell, go out and say, hey this man, he’s got something here, and I’m just giving it to people, I’m giving everyone my leadership after I’m through boxing, so onliest reason I’m fighting these fights is to get the free press.<\/p>\n

I mean, I’m going to go into your head now.\u00a0 You might see me punch the bags, you might be white and we live in a world where black is usually played down.\u00a0 It’s not your fault.\u00a0 They made Jesus Christ like you a white man, they made the Lord something like you, they made all the angels in Heaven like you, Miss America, Tarzan king of the jungle is white, they made angel food cake white.\u00a0 You all been brainwashed, we been brainwashed like we’re nothing.\u00a0 You been brainwashed to think you’re wiser and better than everybody, it ain’t your fault.\u00a0 I’m just admit to that.\u00a0 I’m just a boxer, and a boxer is the last person to have wisdom, they’re usually brutes.\u00a0 I’m matching my brain with yours and showing you I’m not going to get on you, but I’m gonna make you feel like a kindergarten child.\u00a0 This black boxer here will make you feel like a kindergarten child.\u00a0 I can give you something more fresh, make you ashamed of your household.\u00a0 I got something here.<\/p>\n

I had frequently sat still for Ali’s lectures because they interested me.\u00a0 He was a mesmerizing orator, and nothing critical he said was ever aimed at anyone personally, but this, I could see, was going to be different.\u00a0 As I listened to Ali’s words, trying to follow their meaning, I blanched internally, realizing that Muhammad Ali was going to lecture Andy Warhol on the very same moral crisis in our society that many people had been blaming on Warhol for the last ten years.\u00a0 I didn’t know how he would react, but I didn’t think it would be well.\u00a0 Despite saying that he welcomed all publicity, whether it was negative or positive, the post-shooting Warhol got upset when he was blamed for everything that was wrong in America, especially by someone who was just parroting a party line.<\/p>\n

I was equally concerned about Ali.\u00a0 He was used to being applauded regardless of what he said.\u00a0 But now, Andy wasn’t going to look kindly on what he said, and Andy had an unusual ability to cut people to pieces with his eyes.\u00a0 That is to say, by casting a slicing glance at his interlocutors, Warhol was able to discombobulate them so completely that they could not concentrate on what they were saying.\u00a0 They started to repeat themselves, trip over their own words and generally lose their grip.\u00a0 I remember ruefully concluding that it was Ali, not Warhol, who was going to need a buffer.\u00a0 But there was nothing I could do to stop Ali once he launched his attack.<\/p>\n

You got rape is high in New York, right?\u00a0 The whole country.\u00a0 Prostitution.\u00a0 Homosexuality.\u00a0 They marching and you’re shocked to see so many.\u00a0 The gay people, all the news and murder and killing.\u00a0 They rob.\u00a0 Everything just go wild.\u00a0 Ain’t no religion seem to have no power.\u00a0 The church is the Pope the everything don’t mean nothing.\u00a0 They talk on Sunday the same song they sing their message.\u00a0 All hell starts back.\u00a0 And everything’s failing.\u00a0 The governments are crooked, the people\u2014don’t know who to trust.\u00a0 And everything’s gone wild\u2014racism, religious groups bombing each other.\u00a0 The Muslims now fighting over in Egypt and Libya, Bangladesh and Pakistan.\u00a0 The whole world is fighting.\u00a0 Everybody’s in trouble, right?\u00a0 So the good lecture tonight [it was noon] is The Real Cause of Man’s Distress and says they’re realities and laws of nature in the world that we all must obey.<\/p>\n

In retrospect, this montage\u2014reminiscent of William Burroughs’ The Last Words of Dutch Schultz<\/em>\u2014probably had as much to do with the incipient brain damage that would soon leave Ali almost completely bereft of his voice as it did with his reactions to any facial fencing Warhol might have thrown at him.\u00a0 One of the points Andy made after we left was how glad he was that “Ali kept looking at me all the time he was talking.”<\/p>\n

Without pausing, Ali continued to fire away:<\/p>\n

I ask you why we’re having so much crime in the world\u2026Women with their legs wide open, two men screwing each other right on a magazine stand!\u00a0 You can walk down the street and duck in a movie and watch them screwing.\u00a0 Little child sixteen years old go in can watch them screwing and he’s too young to get his own sex so he gotta rape somebody, he gotta watch the movie.\u00a0 You go to NYC and see everything in the movies, every act, oral sex, you sit there and watch it.\u00a0 And the magazine stands are so filthy you can’t even walk by with your children.<\/p>\n

[Screaming] Right?\u00a0 Walk down the street and look at it, you got children!\u00a0 Women are screwing women!\u00a0 Men are sucking each other’s blood.\u00a0 Public prostitution on the doorsteps of the White House.\u00a0 Morality in America has been shattered and the social well being destroyed and the powers and facilities which God has left for the good of man kind are being used for bombs and bullets and destruction of mankind.\u00a0 No faith.\u00a0 Man has lost faith in man.<\/p>\n

For an uninterrupted forty-five minutes Ali careened through a wide variety of Muslim sayings, “down home” sayings, imitations, digressions and constant repetitions.\u00a0 He talked about gravity, meteorites, jumping out of the window, Israel, Egypt, Zaire, South Africa, drugs, broken skulls, delusions, angel food cake, yellow hair, judgment day, shattered morality, Jesus, boxing, Sweden, the Koran, friendship\u2026Elvis, relating it all to the central point that man must obey the laws of God or perish<\/em>.<\/p>\n

At his best, Muhammad was a master of oratory.\u00a0 He had a beautiful voice, hands and face\u2014the essential tools of a public speaker\u2014and he could work all three simultaneously.\u00a0 At his worst, he sounded like somebody who was reading something he did not really understand.<\/p>\n

When I interviewed Ali in the period between 1972 and 1974, he could control his breathing so well he could rap endlessly, take off on limitless tangents and still return to make his point every time.\u00a0 During those years, I sometimes felt as if I was seeing another Martin Luther King in the making.\u00a0 Buy by 1977, four years and nine fights later, Ali was not only missing all his marks, he was rushing his text, losing its rhythm, at times even rendering it meaningless.\u00a0 “I am getting ready to go out and be the next black Billy Graham,” he concluded, somewhat surrealistically.<\/p>\n

Ali apparently harbored the belief<\/strong> that if he repeated the same thing over and over again, not only would Warhol come to agree with him, but he would want to help him get on the lecture circuit and deliver these well-meant but unbalanced rants to millions of people around the world.\u00a0 Meanwhile, the reverse was happening.\u00a0 Despite his image as the cool, detached observer, Warhol didn’t like being harassed like this, and he particularly despised any form of paternalism.\u00a0 By now, Ali had pushed all the wrong buttons in Warhol.\u00a0 What he could not have know was that Warhol was not only the consummate listener, he was also the consummate dismisser.\u00a0 The combination of his slicing glance and his I’m-a-stone-statute-just-sitting-here-being-Andy-Warhol-and-nothing-can-penetrate-me act would have thrown anyone who had not seen it before off their spot.<\/p>\n

Warhol was as creative an interviewer as he was a filmmaker,\u00a0 In fact, at the outset of his film career, he combined the two forms in a series of films called Screentests<\/em>.\u00a0 His concept was that if he trained his immobile camera relentlessly on his subjects’ faces while somebody off camera (unheard by the audience) interviewed them about the most embarrassing experiences in their lives, the result would be an extraordinarily revealing, if at times brutal, portrait.<\/p>\n

The hard beauty of the Ali-Warhol tapes rears up in their final fifteen minutes.\u00a0 Here Warhol combined his interviewing skills with an homage to Ali-s rope-a-dope technique to create the most revealing voice portrait of Ali in this period of his life that I have ever seen.<\/p>\n

Just as George Foreman in the 1974 title fight in Zaire was rendered tired and senseless after pounding away at Ali’s body while Ali laid back on the \u00a0ropes taking all of the punishment the champion could inflict, so now was Ali rendered tired and senseless after pounding away verbally at Warhol for forty-five minutes while Andy, as it were, lay back on the ropes taking all the punishment the champion could inflict.\u00a0 In all the time I had interviewed Ali or watched Ali being interviewed, I had never seen him as tired, vulnerable and, without meaning to be, as honest as he now became.\u00a0 I’m getting tired of talking,” he admitted ruefully to Warhol, who remained silent.<\/p>\n

I’m all right boss, I’m the first heavyweight champion that was his own boss,\u00a0 Ain’t got nobody to tell me when to work, when to train, I don’t have to train today, I don’t have to run\u2014I didn’t run.\u00a0 I can do anything.\u00a0 I can leave town today.\u00a0 I’m free.\u00a0 Herbert Muhammad is the boss, and he never even seen me train, he don’t come to bother me.\u00a0 I’m totally free, I’m the first free black world man they’ve ever had.<\/p>\n

This, and everything that went before it, was vintage Ali, but what Warhol really got out of Muhammad Ali that day, which no other interviewer I know of ever did, was the feeling of desperation the champion was beginning to have about getting out of boxing.\u00a0 Again, bearing in mind that the transcription is \u00e0 la Warhol’s word-for-word prescription, read this with a care and attention you would read a poem: “I mean, no, I’m free, I can’t get fired, don’t have nobody black or white that are my boss,” Ali said.<\/p>\n

Y’all can’t do what you want to do.\u00a0 You can’t say take this policy to the TV station or who you gonna tell you got to come do your story, do what they say you do, you can’t take off when you want to take off.\u00a0 I’m the onliest free, black or what, actual entertainer that’s free to do what he want.\u00a0 That’s something.\u00a0 That’s a good feeling.\u00a0 I’m on time.\u00a0 I work.\u00a0 Tell you I’m gonna be here today, I am, right?\u00a0 I just got in yesterday, I’m on time, I’m on my own\u2026So all I’m gonna do, I gotta couple bums to meet, then I retire, get by briefcase, get my stuff, like a Billy Graham, seriously and we got a hundred thousand in Jamaica, Manly, Miscall Manly the Jamaica coliseum, they got a hundred thousand people waiting.\u00a0 Penelton, black prime minister of the Bahamas, they got sixty-five thousand in a soccer field waiting for me.<\/p>\n

So by me fighting two more fights, I can do all this preaching, I can get this ministry started, let them know what to look for next.\u00a0 But if I say retire and go call a press conference to tell you all that I want to be is an Islamic evangelist, then they won’t print it, they’re gonna hide it, they won’t let it get out, cause its power to get out, its certain powers.\u00a0 But they gotta do it if I’m in the ring just knowk’em out and grab the mike: “Isamaleka,” means peace on earth to all my brothers of the world.\u00a0 I thank almighty God, Allah, my power, if it were not for Allah, my God, and the power of religion, I wouldn’t be here at thirty-five years old breaking all these records.\u00a0 All my Muslim brothers all colors of all the world, Isamaleka, two billion are watching, “hello,” I call out to all the Pakistanis and Indians, Morocco, Africa, I tell you I know them,\u00a0 So what I’m saying, they rejoice.\u00a0 How can I get that if I don’t fight?\u00a0 If I want a message going on the world beam wire, how’m I gonna, what, President Carter don’t talk to the world.\u00a0 He talk to America, everybody sure be telling you, but he never talks to the world.\u00a0 I talk to the world when I fight, I mean the world is there.\u00a0 So if I fight two more fights, three more fights, I talk to the world three times and I might have forty-five press conferences and you all take pictures of my mosque.\u00a0 If I don’t fight you wouldn’t be here, so boxing and entertaining I use as bait, you go fishing, you put a worm in the water and then the worm, then the fish see the worm you bite it, and behind the worm is a hook, he got more’n he asked for.\u00a0 So I put the movies out, premieres, I pull up in a Rolls Royce in England, my tux here, I get out and me and my wife and all the people looking, they respect people like that.\u00a0 I go to Madison Square Garden, the seats’ll be packed, the stands’ll be packed you’ll see ’em selling popcorn and smoke in the arena, in this corner Muhammad Ali!\u00a0 And I go into my Islamic prayer, promoting my faith, God.\u00a0 But if I wasn’t fighting\u2026so I can just take one more year, three more fights, and get one hundred million dollars worth of publicity, to let the people know what I’m getting ready to go and do.<\/p>\n

The way I see it<\/strong>, Andy Warhol painted two portraits of Muhammad Ali that hot day in August twenty-one years ago: There is the silk-screen image on canvas of the fearless champion, his fists curled just below his face ready to snap off a barrage of punches, and there is the voice of the creative rapper, not unlike Elvis Presley in his last days on stage, trying to make sense out of the all-important fact that he is free, along with the fact that he has to fight “only three more fights.”\u00a0 It was sense that Ali would not, indeed could not, have made at the time, precisely because he was not free but was in fact the unwitting captive of the parasites who had attached themselves to him since the 1960s.\u00a0 These leeches who chose his doctors, lawyers and financial advisors siphoned as much cash as they could from him, careless of his well-being, his health or the future.<\/p>\n

With his gift for deftly putting things in perspective, Warhol did not utter a word until we were out of earshot but still in sight of Ali.\u00a0 Before the limousine that had brought us to Fighter’s heaven cleared its parking lot, he was all over me with his reaction and one central, jabbing question:<\/p>\n

His problem is he’s in show business.\u00a0 It’s hard to get out.\u00a0 I mean, it’s like, he could be threatened.\u00a0 But I’m surprised fighters don’t take drugs, because it’s just like being a rock star.\u00a0 You get out there and you’re entertaining thirty thousand people.\u00a0 I mean, you’re a different person.\u00a0 I think that’s why Ali’s different.\u00a0 But what did he say?\u00a0 Two guys sitting on a what?\u00a0 Why throw that in?\u00a0 That’s so funny.\u00a0 I think he’s a male chauvinist pig, right?\u00a0 He’s a male chauvinist pig?\u00a0 Because, I mean, how can he preach like that?\u00a0 It’s so crazy, he just repeats the same simplicity over and over again, and then it drums on people’s ears.\u00a0 Maybe he was just doing it especially for us.\u00a0 I don’t know.\u00a0 It’s so crazy.\u00a0 But he can say the same things because he’s so good looking that he has something more than another person does.<\/p>\n

It was good to see, but it shouldn’t have been so long.\u00a0 I think he was just torturing us.<\/p>\n

What I can’t figure out is, is he intelligent”\u00a0 I know he’s clever, but I mean, is he intelligent?\u00a0 Is he intelligent?\u00a0 That’s what I can’t figure out.<\/p>\n

_____<\/p>\n

This article first appeared in the April 1999 issue of\u00a0<\/em>Gadfly Magazine<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Victor Bockris:\u00a0 On the other hand, you always said you just like to have people who talk a lot when you turn the tape recorder on. Andy Warhol:\u00a0 Well, listen, that’s the thing.\u00a0 I mean, God! That’s your interview.\u00a0 I didn’t get one word in, so that was the ultimate.\u00a0 It was the perfect interview.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":97,"featured_media":3795,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,201,219],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3794"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/97"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3794"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3878,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3794\/revisions\/3878"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}