Bob Dylan and Edie Sedgwick, Being Electric + Doing It Now: The Void with Christina + Michele Episode #58

Christina Rowatt and Michele Madden discuss Michele’s upcoming first live performance in four years, her scandalous new chapter in Bob Dylan anthology “Tarantula Revisited,” being electric, aural romance, going green and all the regular innuendo and silliness you’ve come to expect from the Sisters of Eternal Belligerence. Listen on Spotify, Soundcloud or iTunes.

Christina: How did you get involved in the Bob Dylan project, especially considering you hate Bob Dylan?

Michele: “Being a natural correspondent, I’ve kept in touch with pretty much everyone who has ever turned up to any of my shows, or read anything I’ve ever done. There’s this fantastic gentleman called Mikael Ekström from Sweden. He got in touch with me over the interweblicles a couple of years ago and said Michele you are one of my favourite musicians … I said lie down, have a good nap, take two Panadol and it will pass.

Mikael is a very respected writer in Sweden and a professor. He put me in a textbook, if you can believe it. In the Swedish school curriculum, he established a class for the kids who were falling through the cracks. He contacted all his favourite artists who he knew had had interesting and varied lives, and he asked us all to contribute to this textbook. There are quizzes after all of our pieces. This was how I got published side by side with my future ex husband Henry Rollins. So I’ve always had a great respect for Mikael  and we’ve always kept in touch.

Mikael has a record company with several friends called Thunder and Lightning Records in Sweden. He hit me out of the blue a couple of months ago and said we’re doing a book called “Tarantula Revisited.” Bob Dylan wrote a book called Tarantula back in the day, high as shit when everyone thought he was God. Mikael said we’re doing the ring around and we’re going to get all of our artists we admire to be a part of it. I was like “I hate Bob Dylan. I am in!” I just thought everyone would have their head so far up Bob Dylan’s arse it is going to look like a pretzel convention to the sound of “Tambourine Man.”

So I started thinking … we’re all scavengers. We all take from life and life takes from us and we all stitch [it]together.What occurred to me about Mr. Dylan and many artists – myself included – is that we are Vikings, we are pillagers. I took [my chapter] from the male perspective and thought of one of my own personal tragic heroines that I adore, Edith Minton Sedgwick. The Factory Girl who The Cult wrote the song “Edie Fire Woman” about. I heard that when i was a little girl and I was absolutely fascinated. And then I found the Jean Stein and George Plimpton book “Edie” – I stole it from a party when I was eleven years old. She was an Andy Warhol muse and she was one of the original It Girls. Bob was attached to her at one point and I thought of all of the muses. What happens to the muses when they cease to be amusing? I wrote about it.”

Michele’s rousing live reading of her chapter from new Bob Dylan anthology, “Tarantula Revisited” is below.

Listen to The Void with Christina podcast on Spotify | iTunes | Soundcloud

Continue the discussion on Instagram with Christina @xtina_rowatt, and Michele @homicidegirl7.  Check out Christina’s video interviews at youtube.com/thevoidwithchristina. Thanks for listening.