Usually, I’d begin by provoking him. I’d try to make him feel uncomfortable by challenging him with abrasive statements or offensive opinions. I’d pinch him, break a plate, scream and curse until I got some kind of reaction—facial, bodily, olfactory, anything. And if I was successful, in the space of a few minutes I’d watch the transformation begin: his eyes fogging over and then clearing up, his neck muscles tensing and relaxing, the skin on his forehead raising and lowering. His whole self was dipping in and out of awareness like a radio tuning itself to a particular frequency. With each session he became quicker and more efficient. On good days it was among the most remarkable human feats I’ve ever witnessed: a man living in a constant state of being born and dying, endlessly perfecting himself for the situation he was in.

  The following interview is the last of our series of talks in Vegas, and the first of them to be public. We spoke onstage at The Colosseum on a sunny Saturday afternoon in front of a live audience. The event was sold out, and stretched out for fifty minutes longer than expected, mostly due to the extensive question-and-answer period that followed our talk. By the end of the second hour, I was shooting Marshal looks about cutting off the audience’s questions, but I could see in his eyes that he was as eager as they were. So we pressed on.

  —

  [audience applause as INTERVIEWER and MARSHAL ISLE take their seats]

  INTERVIEWER: So you’re living in a palace now.

  MARSHAL ISLE: [laughs] Yes, for the next six months, till the residency ends.

  I: And you’ve been involved with this whole project since the beginning, is that right?

  MI: Yes, which was about four years ago.

  I: And what aspects of the show are you working on?

  MI: Everything. Lighting, music, choreography, set list, costume, choosing the crew, diet, schedule. Put ‘em all in a pot. Mix it up. Funny thing is, I know nothing about most of this stuff, but even if I can’t turn on a light, I do know what effect the light has on the audience—red, yellow, white, bright, soft. And that’s all Maggie wants from me. When we started this whole project, all we had in mind was the impression she would make. Not the music. Not the dancing. The impression.

  I: And she just put you in charge from the start.

  MI: Mm hm.

  I: You’ve joined at a very important time in her career.

  MI: The renaissance.

  I: Was she ever considering stepping away from music altogether?

  MI: She was. Right after the Magdalena years, when she took the turn back toward Maggie. It was a significant moment, both for her and for PM as a whole, because she was returning to her original personality. Back to where she started. It’s not easy and not many people have done this. It’s a whole different process, and her p was quite drained at that point, so I had to try some new methods. In her case, the process created a kind of self-awareness that prevented her from performing for a few years.

  I: Did you help to make that turn?

  MI: I did, yeah, at the old soundstage. And a feisty turn it was.

  I: So you’re to blame for depriving us of Lena’s next record?

  [audience laughter]

  I: And so when she came out of that turn, what was the situation? She just didn’t enjoy making music anymore?

  MI: Well, coming out of a turn, as I’m sure some of you know, there’s a period of hollowness. It’s a total lack of any drive. Most guests love this feeling. But there are some who can’t handle it. They find it uncomfortable.

  I: I’ve heard it called “feeling skeleton.”

  MI: Right. It’s about working from the inside out, starting deep within the body, where it’s dark, where the bones are, and then slowly moving your awareness outward, toward the skin. But to do that, you have to begin at complete ignorance.

  I: Is it true that Maggie had to be restrained for the turn?

  MI: She was a little wild, yes. I got scratched up, which happens from time to time. It’s not a state I encourage, ferocity, but sometimes it’s necessary. During that skeleton period, the p has to circulate to all the parts of the body—fingers, toes, interspaces. It’s like pins and needles all over. With Maggie, she kept screaming at us to stop hugging her, even though, when you watch the tape, you can clearly see that no one was touching her. She was slapping away someone who wasn’t even there. We’d leave the room and she’d keep slapping and screaming, “get her off me.”

  I: Hallucinating.

  MI: But it wasn’t that she was seeing or hearing anything unusual. It was all haptic. She kept saying she felt something wrap its arms around her, enter her vagina, her ears, her mouth.

  I: Was this because she was returning to Maggie?

  MI: We were trying new techniques. We really had to pull new p for this turn. So the fighting, it could’ve been due to a lot of things. I’ve seen some of the footage from her previous turns, and she’d always bounce back easily. She’d be onstage in a few days. But this time, it was a very long journey back. Years. Like I said, she wasn’t sure she’d ever perform again.

  I: How long have you two known each other?

  MI: Nine years. She was a guest on the show in ‘05. During Magdalena.

  I: That was right before her hiatus.

  MI: We met backstage. Mayah and I were doing some preshow prep work in our dressing room and one of Mag’s assistants knocked and asked if she could join the two of us. Now, normally, at that time, Mayah wouldn’t even have considered letting anyone in during prework—she was very private about that—but that episode, she knew it would be important for the movement, for the show, and she didn’t want to jeopardize the situation, so she invited her in and a friendship was born.

  I: When you say jeopardize the situation—

  MI: She didn’t want Magdalena to cancel or walk off the set, which was a possibility. You know how she was.

  I: The great capricious diva.

  MI: And we all loved her for it. You need divas in the world. And that day, when she joined us for the work, that’s when I really saw the softness of her p. How malleable she kept it. How perfectly superficial and elegant. And all of that, I think, is thanks to her diva nature.

  I: To be honest, I’m surprised you’re willing to talk about her personalities so freely.

  MI: Of course.

  I: I just remember the policy with Mayah. No talk of old personalities allowed.

  MI: Maggie does things differently. She wants the whole process transparent. No more forgetting. But of course, that’s new policy, and you’re right, she wasn’t always like that. During Lena, she wouldn’t talk to anyone she considered bad for her personality. When she was getting ready for a show, no one could speak to her. When she’d make the walk from her green room to the stage, all the other bands would have to stay hidden in their dressing rooms, doors closed, with one of Lena’s guards on watch. And after a show, she’d walk directly offstage, slide into her car, and be driven off before anyone could congratulate her. Everyone took it as an elitist thing, but it wasn’t. It was just the only way she could keep going. One wrong posture could throw her off for days. And she’d keep extensive notes, recording everything that affected her. Any food or person or sound. She told me once that if she smiled with the wrong muscles, she’d start to picture her face as a “nasty curtain of flesh”—that’s how she put it. Horrific, right? What a nightmare it must have been for her. She had to be so careful about everything. She had to be perfect. Because that’s why people loved her.

  I: I feel like every time I read about the Magdalena tour she was storming off a stage mid-set.

  MI: She’d throw fits at every show.

  I: And wasn’t there some incident at the Grammys? When she dropped the award.

  MI: Right, that’s right. She got on her knees and sang to the little broken gold gramophone parts. Everyone thought she’d lost her mind.

  I: I never saw a Lena show, but I saw Miss in the early ‘90s in Orange County, when she was still playing to smallish clubs. I remember, she came out and sat down at the piano and started a song but kept hitting wrong notes. It was a little embarrassing. It was like watching someone hurt herself in public. Because it wasn’t as if she didn’t care. She’d get frustrated, try a different song, and then flub that one too. And then, at some point she started kicking the piano and she stepped down from the stage and started pushing her way through the audience to the back of the club. No spotlight or anything. I’d thought she was leaving but then I started to hear this very muffled, distant voice, and it was her, singing into a mirror on the wall. But again, it wasn’t like she was crazy. People kept suggesting she was too high to know what she was doing, which, maybe she was, but I got the sense that she was very aware of what was going on. And it went on for a while. She did quite a few songs like this, a cappella, and then she just walked out the front door and didn’t come back. It was—nobody knew what to do. We all stood there for a while, waiting for her to come back in, but she didn’t. That was the whole concert.

  MI: Love that story. I actually didn’t see any of those performances in person, but I’ve watched a lot of them on video. I’ve studied every move, every pose, and I’ve got to say that I think these new performances are more generous than any of those—Miss, Mala, Lena…all of them. This is all personalities at once. The queen is back.

  I: Has she stopped making turns?

  MI: Let me say this: we’re always working on her. Every day we’re watching rehearsal videos, concert footage, all that. She has a library of her whole career, and we’re always studying it, refining it. But it’s different now. These days, she’s always turning. That’s the new path.

  I: Newness has always been her thing. Avoiding what she’s done before.

  MI: “An elegant line never returns.”9

  [audience woots]

  I: Quotes from the master.

  MI: For those of you sticking around, you’ll hear that one in a few hours. But that’s it. That’s all I’m going to say about the show. [laughs]

  I: Or what’s that line? “Addicted to the new you.” Is that it?

  MI: Yes, yes.

  I: I often wonder about musicians playing the same songs every night on tour, finding something worthwhile in the same material over and over, for years. But with Maggie, she’s always changing the way she plays them. I remember when she did “Consequence” at the Super Bowl in ‘04—I barely recognized it. The melody was flipped, she made up new words. It almost wasn’t the same song.

  MI: It’s why people bootleg her shows. Always turning. Always turning.

  I: That performance was Mala. I’m curious how you would describe her? I’ve always had trouble grasping what she was going for with that period.

  MI: The voice was a big part of it. When she sang, she’d project p from the center of her throat. [points to his Adam’s apple, growls] She’d tighten her stern­ocleidoma­stoids to get a little strain. Not too much. Just enough to get a little p in the cracks.

  I: Mala didn’t go over very well with critics, which surprised me, since all the other turns have been so mediagenic.

  MI: Of course, that whole personality was unattractive. It was supposed to be. The way she dressed with the black, corrugated codpiece.

  I: The steel mesh cape.

  MI: Plus it was all reactive moves. She built that character on the defensive. She’d send all those little aggressive shudders down her spine. [shakes his shoulders and hips]

  I: I remember the “Sharpen Up” video. I think every American high school girl slipped those spasms into their dance vocabulary that year.

  MI: Remember this one? [opens and closes both hands in quick flicking motion] Same kind of move. She could aim the p around her body like that. But that was hard to keep up. She did all that by attacking herself from the inside out. She’d build up an intense fury before shows. She’d sit in a dark closet cultivating it backstage for an hour. There’s this rehearsal footage from New Year’s where she’s teaching that group of ninety-four dancers how to make all those little lurches and jabs, and it’s great to watch, because the dancers couldn’t really do them. And it’s ‘cause you have to be pissed. That’s the only way they’ll work.

  I: Would you say Mala was a toxic personality?

  MI: I mean—

  I: Unless you’d rather not discuss that.

  MI: By all means, let’s discuss it. [taps feet] She was the bad girl. Toward the end of that personality, she wasn’t healthy. She wouldn’t eat real food. Just sour gummy worms and candy corn all day. And she couldn’t sleep for more than a few hours. So that’s when she started taking high doses of Ambien, mixed with various analgesics. And when she overdosed at the Maritime10 that was an OD on Mala. All that p was too much to hold. It needed expectations. Every personality has to eat something, and Mala, unfortunately, ate ambition.

  I: It needed to be praised.

  MI: Not praise. That’s different. Praise is kinetic energy. It’s tangible. Someone says something nice to you, they write something complimentary about you. But expectations are harder to pin down. They’re more like potential energy. And she took the turn toward Mala to create those expectations, to have a certain effect on her audience, which is dangerous because the world is fickle. As soon as it stops anticipating your next move, your food supply has run out.

  I: Let’s change gears here. I want to ask you about the end of M! I haven’t heard you talk about this much publicly since the final show. Do you think it should have ended when it did? Did it run its course?

  MI: Twenty-one seasons. That’s a good life.

  [audience applause]

  I: It’s true, but at the same time, did you think there was more to be done with it? Do you think Mull and the trial ended it prematurely?

  MI: No, I don’t, and here’s what I’ll say about all of that. This is medicine. Experimental medicine. There are risks. No one has ever claimed that any kind of healing is free of risk,

  right? Drugs, diet, exercise. All these things are fatal if they go wrong. You asked me if Mala was toxic. You used that word. And the answer is, maybe. It’s possible. Because all medicine is toxic, depending on the context. What heals one person kills another. If you take just the right amount at the right time under the right circumstances it will help you. Or it will hurt you and help you. Both. At once.

  I: In light of that, maybe we could talk about the comas?

  MI: The women in Florida, in Boca [Raton]? Sure. Let’s address that, too. First of all, both of them were pushing the safe age for an intensive self-treatment like that. They were what—seventy-seven, seventy-eight?

  I: Maybe older.

  MI: Maybe older! Now, I think it’s great to be engaged with p at that age, but I also think you have to be sensible. P gets weaker. Like everything else in the body. At that age, the best thing to do is work with what you already have. No practitioner I know would have encouraged those women to be making turns.

  I: So you think it was largely their fault?

  MI: Tsch. Of course it was. Fault is a dirty word, of course, but, yes. I always try to instill in people just how powerful the work is. Even if it seems easy when you watch it done on TV. It’s not benign. It absorbs you. And at the age of seventy-eight, you need to be putting your p elsewhere, into basic, daily lessons. The gradual turns.

  I: Big turns are for the young.

  MI: I mean. I could go on and on, because I think there’s a lot to be said here about growing old with dignity, but I hope that these incidents, all of them, are testament to the problems of ignoring your age.

  I: Right.

  MI: I apologize if I seem riled up here.

  I: Oh no, I think we all understand. I wanted you to speak your mind on this. Age is a conflicted subject these days.

  MI: It should be. I hope everyone here is as sick of ageism as I am.

  [audience applause]

  I: Speaking of which, we were discussing a story from Maggie’s childhood earlier. She hated being a child, it seems like.

  MI: Yeah. She felt oppressed.

  I: And you were saying how she dropped out of high school—

  MI: Yes, there was an incident with a young boy. Long story.

  I: Well, I don’t know anything about this and I’m sure everyone here would love to hear you tell it.

  [audience applause]

  MI: Sure. I only know parts of the story, and I’m betting Maggie could do a better job, but I’ll try. So, this was when she was in high school, and it began when she met a boy named Tooth. It wasn’t his real name, of course, but everyone called him that, I think because he had rotten teeth, and only a few of them. He was poor and lived on the back of the mountain where I guess dental hygiene wasn’t great.

  I: This was in rural Georgia, where she was raised, right? Blue Ridge Mountains.

  MI: That’s right. I’ve never been. From the way Maggie tells it, I get the sense that Tooth lived in a very rural place. Not a farm, but a sort of rustic camp. No running water or electricity. And she’d tell me how his shoes and clothes had big holes and…you have to hear Maggie do his voice. She puts good p into it. But yeah, he was dirty and as you can imagine he wasn’t loved by the other kids. He smelled bad and he’d do stuff like, he’d sneak out to the corner of the yard during recess and shit in his pants and then not wash it out, so it would just stay there, drying to his legs, and the stink would fill up the classroom. That kind of thing. All the children would hold their noses when they walked past him and make barfing sounds.

  I: Oh geez.

  MI: And Maggie, of course, the little pious angel, even then—she befriended him in class when no one else would. She ate with him. She pretended to laugh at his jokes, even though I guess his speech was difficult for her to understand.

  I: Maggie wasn’t raised poor, though.

  MI: No, she wasn’t. And that’s important. This area—I think her father had taken a job there, as a scientist—it was a destitute little town, the way she describes it. And also, she was fifteen but Tooth was a little younger. Twelve or so. But at this school everyone was in the same building—older kids, younger kids. It was small. Maggie showed me a picture of her class and there were maybe eight kids in it.

 

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