Mick Jagger, Yoko Ono, Lou Reed and More Talk About 9/11 Devastation

I was in a state of shock, because [my daughter] Elizabeth lives about fifteen blocks away. We couldn’t get through. In the evening, we managed to get through via South Africa, which was really weird.

What I feel from a lot of my American friends, although they’re not really able to put it into words, is a sense of violation. It’s a horrible thing to have that feeling broken – that America was this place where they all felt safe. We’ve lived [in England] for the last thirty years with that – people who would throw bombs in pubs and shopping malls, where innocent people were. I’ve been in several situations where that’s happened, where you would hear a bomb go off. It was very scary.

With terrorism, whether you kill five people or 5,000, it is still a disregard for normal human values, what you expect in a civilised society. I never believed in violence as a way of achieving the political ends that we mentioned in songs like “Street Fighting Man.” The people that believe in it – I have no time for them whatsoever, no time for the romantic notions that surround them.

I was in France at the beginning of this, then in Britain, and the overwhelming feeling of shock was swiftly replaced by an outpouring of brotherhood. There was real solidarity and sympathy, the feeling that we wanted to be there with you. It was genuine and very moving. There was this thing on TV from Germany, this huge attendance at a memorial service. It was massive.

But how that translates into the next step, this intangible military activity – the mystery of that is, how is it going to be and what is going to happen? The Middle East is a lot nearer Europe than it is America. That means quite a lot when you’re talking about ballistic missiles and the involvement of Iraq. I’m not saying people are running scared, but it’s a different view. And we have many people of Middle Eastern origin living in these countries, which complicates the emotion.

People are saying to me, and I felt the same way: “I couldn’t do anything for a week. My life, all my things, feel so trivial.” But to some extent, after the shock and mourning comes the adjustment to real life. During times of war, my parents tried to carry on as normally as much as you can, with adjustments. You can’t let terrorists completely change your lifestyle. They would love that. That’s a victory.

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Lou Reed

I saw it from my roof in the Village. I could see and smell the smoke for days. I still see it – it’s still there. we’re paying a price for what some of our political leaders have done in the name of oil. This is not just out of the blue. It’s not just for nothing. And as someone who tours a lot and goes to airports all the time, I’ve always noticed the lack of security in the United States. We’ve never been serious about security. Security has always been aimed at drugs. These guys have demonstrated to us that we don’t need a Star Wars missile defense. All it took was two tickets from Boston to L.A.

It’s so crazy here. These T-shirts are for sale, with a picture of the towers and saying, like, I ESCAPED. Jesus. But that’s the beauty of democracy in New York. There’s room for everybody, including the bottom feeders. We’ve got all the local lunatics calling in false alarms. In the midst of all this, to call in a false alarm?

A bunch of us were walking around, and we passed the movie theatre in Union Square. It was so weird, all lit up but no one there. But there were a couple of guys inside, and they came out and said, “Listen, this is a safe house tonight. If you want to use the bathroom or you need to sleep or you just feel sad and want to go someplace, come on in.” We were overcome by that. I like to think that’s what New York is all about. That night, ninety-nine percent of the people were going out of their way, really trying to be helpful to other people.

Touring again? I talked to Tony Smith, my drummer, this morning – let’s get back out there. I mean, I’ve been in riots in Italy when God knows what was going on with the Red Brigade. We’ve been traipsing around Europe when this or that has blown up. This ups the ante by a lot. But it’s not only: What are you going to do about touring, it’s: What are you going to do with your life? Is there a point to what we do? I think there is. Making music, creating beautiful things. We have to be in love with the good and the beautiful. If we are not, then you’re in a nihilistic state.

I believe good comes out of bad. Always. One way or the other. It may take a long time to see it. Everybody I know is depressed and found it hard to focus, but the only way out of that is working – doing positive things. We were in the middle of making a new record. Nobody was going to stop me from getting the record done. And that’s that. We’re trying to create something beautiful.

I’m not leaving New York. And neither is anyone else. We’re here. We are quintessential Americans – we’re not only American but New York-American.

The magnitude of this tragedy – I can’t even begin to comprehend what has happened. I can only hope that we will have the sense to move forward in a way that doesn’t inflict any more suffering on innocent, impoverished people in the name of revenge. Afghanistan is a poor country. This is not a time to add to the list of civilians around the world who have been killed as a result of our actions. I don’t know what the answer is, but it seems to me that the smart thing and the most respectful thing to the families grieving over this horrible, horrible tragedy is to be honest about understanding why it might have happened. Then we can try to prevent it from happening again. I think it’s important to address the question of why so many people, other than terrorists, hate our country. What kind of effects do our prolonged economic sanctions have on Iraqi children? These kinds of questions are important in light of the decisions that will be made in the near future about our actions in response to these attacks. No one wants to see any more suffering.

I definitely went back to my childhood in Tokyo during World War II. I remembered that every night there would be a siren, and that meant that the B-52 were overhead. We had to go to the shelters. Then you heard the bombs coming down. They had a very special sound – this “boom, boom” – and you knew that they were coming closer to where we were. And you would think that it was going to come down on you. But then it stopped, you came out of the shelter and realised that you would live for another day.

I think we’re going to create a new reality together. We are one mind, one body. And we have received an incredible shock to our body. This is a time for us to realise that we should not try, through anger or fear, to cut off another arm. That body has to live and survive. It’s true what Mahatma Gandhi said: “An eye for an eye only leaves the whole world blind.”

John would have been extremely angry. But he was not dumb. He was a wise guy. He knew we had to work not from our emotions but from our wisdom. In the 1960s, when the political radicals were saying, “Kill the pigs” – meaning the police – we said, “Hug the pigs. Kiss a cop.” And people thought we were crazy. People who were on our side thought we were crazy. But this is a time of healing. And it’s a time when American citizens should try to know and understand the language and the beliefs of Muslims. Instead of hating them, we should embrace them, and listen to what they have to say. We have to find out what they can tell us about this, and about their faith.

We might have a war, but it’s not the end of the world. We can make it not be the end of the world. I witnessed Hiroshima, and being in Tokyo when Tokyo was burning. And we survived. We are a very resilient people, the human race. My experience was painful, but it made me stronger. I did my best with what I had – the feeling that I had just been through something terrible, but I had survived.

My feeling is that there are some people who are threatened by the idea of peace, because they want to go to war. But we have to have the wisdom not to take these polls too seriously. The polls show more than eighty percent of the people want to go to war. Nobody asked me. No poll researcher came to me to ask those questions. None of my friends were ever asked either. What kind of poll is that?

Quite often as we pray for peace, we imagine war. Imagining and prayer have to go together. Imagine all the people living life in peace while you pray.

I was going to the airport in Los Angeles, on my way to speak to Congress about what’s going on with digital rights for artists, and I got a call that said, “You’re not going to D.C., stay home.” So I stayed home and clung to my boyfriend all day, completely blown away and in shock, speechless. For artists and musicians, whatever people think is the appropriate response for them is appropriate. I’m doing a relief show in San Francisco. And I might release a song that I feel might be of some minuscule, minuscule value in terms of comfort. Because I do feel that music is a healing thing. Last night I was listening to Leonard Cohen and Jeff Buckley. But there are a lot of songs that I can’t listen to right now.

My girlfriend and I live in an apartment three blocks from the World Trade Center. The day before it happened, I sat in the plaza at the base of the Towers, working on this really beautiful song called “Love Bird.” And it was such a beautiful day – the blue sky and the Towers, and all the people walking to and from work. I finished it at three in the morning in our apartment. Then we went to bed.

Erica and I were still asleep when the phone started ringing, and friends were saying that planes had crashed into the Towers. They were both burning, flames shooting out. I heard a man screaming and looked up, and there he was, falling. It was like he was swimming through the air, his tie flapping up around his head. And he landed on the median just in front of our grocery store. Firefighters immediately surrounded him, pushed him onto a gurney and carried him off. There are a lot of images I don’t think I’ll ever be able to erase, but that was the worst.

We discussed the potential for the buildings to collapse, and both of us thought, There’s no way! I started to make a bowl of cereal. Then we heard the first tower go down.

Smoke wrapped around from either side of the window, as if it were arms wrapping around our window, and the view disappeared. That was the moment when everything stopped being normal. We ran out our door. We were both wearing sandals. We abandoned our cell phones and ran down fifteen flights to the lobby, and it was full of smoke. There were bloody people pouring into it.

The building was filling up with smoke, soot and dust. We were breathing in chunks. Erica and I went down the staircase and pushed the door open. We walked out, and it was knee-deep in dust and rubble; you got the sense that people were underneath it. And there was no one anywhere. We were running. When we got four blocks away, the second tower collapsed. Little smoking pieces of metal and glass started raining down on us. And we were in a river of people running alongside the East River. The moment I don’t think I’m ever going to erase is when Erica looked back at me and looked up at the tower, and I could see her looking at her own death. It’s hard not to sound melodramatic, but it was the kind of terror that I’ve never seen on anybody’s face, especially not on my most loved one. You just feel so powerless.

We used to joke, because the Wall Street area after six o’clock is like a graveyard. And now our whole neighbourhood is a fucking graveyard. I don’t think we’ll ever spend a night there again.

Tuesday evening we heard on the news that they needed food for the volunteers, so my wife, my father-in-law and I went out and bought twenty loaves of bread, a bunch of Ziploc bags and some cheese. We got a crate of apples and water and Gatorade and drove down to Chelsea Piers. The triage center had run out of food, so the people down there were really happy to get that. They mentioned that H&H Bagels was going to donate a whole bunch of bagels but they didn’t have a truck to go and get the bagels. So we drove over to H&H and picked up a bunch of bagels.

There were a lot of people volunteering, which is pretty amazing to see. The horrible sides of this are everywhere, but there is a good, strange, ironic side to New Yorkers coming together. The next day we heard on the news that they needed socks, so we bought a few hundred pairs of tube socks and brought those over. That second day, there were droves of people carrying crates of Gatorade and wheeling wagons full of stuff. We saw people cheering the police and firefighters going downtown. There’s always been so much tension in New York between people and the authorities, and now it’s just a different thing.