Mad or what?

Mad or what?

Back in February, figuring there was was no harm in asking, I emailed Jim asking if I could interview his father and also whether I could speak to his psychiatrist at NPI, Murray Zucker. He replied, briefly but pleasantly, that his father was too frail to be interviewed but that he was happy for me to speak to Murray Zucker.

I forwarded Jim’s email to Murray Zucker, and had the interview with Murray scheduled, when 10 minutes before the agreed time, I received an email from Murray, pointing out that he needed Jim’s permission in writing. Signed. Yikes.

Of course, this note was entirely necessary on Murray’s part; in a litigious business, he could be open to some kind of lawsuit at a later date. But the difference between agreeing to something in an email, and writing a letter confirming it, is a profound one. All the more so when the person in question is on tour. I sent off a request, convinced it would be fruitless. Six weeks on, no letter had arrived.

Last week, after a solitary, gentle reminder, I received a letter from Jim Osterberg to Dr Zucker giving him permission to speak. I’m staggered, I guess. I have met Jim a few times, have put him on the cover of MOJO around three times, but I’m still shocked, in a world of control-freakery, at this openness. Grandiose as it might seem, I did feel he had a duty to history to give me permission - but that didn’t mean I thought it would happen.

Dr Zucker was an amazing interview, partly because of his observations on the Jim and Iggy personae. He is checking his own quotes - because there is complicated medical terminology here I don’t want to misquote him - but one intriguing snippet is that, at the time Jim landed up in NPI, it was a leading centre into research on Bipolarity, the condition with which Jim was diagnosed. Kay Jamison, one of the residents at NPI when Jim attended, was herself a sufferer from the condition, has become one of the leading experts on the bipolar illnesses and has written a gripping memoir of her time at the Institute.

http://www.amazon.com/Unquiet-Mind-Memoir-Moods-Madness/dp/0679763309/ref=pd_sim_b_1/102-5260793-7648902

Iggy once joked that, given a recent book suggested that America’s disproportionaly high incidence of bipolarity is at the root of the nation’s financial success, in this as in other things he was ahead of his time. How typical, given his talent for networking, that he should bump into one of the leading names in the field of madness.

Wednesday, 12 July 2006