Don DeLillo - Great Jones Street

Nothing Turns

"VC Sweetheart"

Words-and-music Wunderlick-Azarian

Copyright © 1968 Stanwash Music

All rights administered Arkmaker Music

Used by permission

"Nothing Turns"

Words-and-music Bucky Wunderlick

(Copyright © 1968 Stanwash Music

All rights administered Arkmaker Music

Used by permission

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Excerpts from seminar conducted jointly by the senior editorial board of Chance Mainway Publications and the Issues Committee of the Permanent Symposium for the Restoration of Democratic Options.

The Committee CM Publications

Robert Fielder Sam L. Bradley

Turner Bakey Ross Holroyd

Grace Hall Aline Olmstead

Lester E. B. Niles George Porter

Walter Jencks Olmstead

Clarence B. Washington

Special Guest

Bucky Wunderlick

Mr. Fielder: Turning now to our guest at this morning's round table, I'd like to begin by taking this opportunity to welcome him, if I may, to our Chula Vista complex.

BW: Yes, you may.

Mr. Fielder: We're not accustomed so much to this kind of discussion as we are to a different level or range, for example on the freedoms, or House and Senate priorities, or the emerging issue of pleadings and writs. But no phenomenon in recent years in perhaps the whole history of what we might call popular American culture has so brought about a massing of opinion one way or the other among the men and women, and I count myself among them, as do, I'm sure, most if not all the individuals at this morning's round table, about whether or not we can profitably undertake a dialogue with the kind of young people who are at the very center of all this noise, and I hope nobody objects to that word. Please feel free to address yourself to this question in your own words because we're not, although it may seem so to you, the kind of not-with-it people, not at all, the stuffed shirts we may seem so to you, and we've heard this kind of subfamily vernacular, and even the gracious ladies present at this morning's session, I might venture to guess.

BW: Noise, right. It's the sound. Hertz and megahertz. We mash their skulls with a whole lot of watts. Electricity, right. It's a natural force. We're processing a natural force. Electricity is nature every bit as much as sex is nature. By sex, I mean fucking and the like. Electric current is everywhere. We run it through a system of wires, cables, mikes, amps and so on. It's just nature. Sometimes we put words to it. Nobody can hear the words because they get drowned out by the noise, which is only natural. Our last album we recorded live to get the people's screams in and submerge the words even more and they were gibberish words anyway. Screaming's essential to our sound now. The whole thing is nature processed through instruments and sound controls. We process nature, which I personally regard as a hideous screeching bitch of a thing, being a city boy myself.

Miss Hall: Yes, noise. Extraordinary. How, precisely, one wonders, do you do with it what you do with it? I freely confess to a kind of global migraine every time I go anywhere near one of your records. I mean totally apart from the question of decibels, there's that intermixture of instruments or something that's so sort of shattering to one's composure, to put it mildly.

BW: That's why we're so great. We make noise. We make it louder than anybody else and also better. Any curly-haired boy can write windswept ballads. You have to crush people's heads. That's the only way to make those fuckers listen.

Mr. Porter: But what I'm really trying to get at, really, I think, is the more basic question of human values, human concerns.

Mr. Uolroyd: I think what George is really trying to get at is the effect of this type of thing…

Mr. Porter: No, no, no, no, no.

Mr. Bakey: Lunch.

Mrs. Olmstead: Do you consider yourself an artist? BW: The true artist makes people move. When people read a book or look at a painting, they just sit there or stand there. A long time ago that was okay, that was hip, that was art. Now it's different. I make people move. My sound lifts them right off their ass. I make it happen. Understand. I make it happen. What I'd like to do really is I'd like to injure people with my sound. Maybe actually kill some of them. They'd come there knowing full well. Then we'd play and sing and people in the audience would be frozen with pain or writhing with pain and some of them would actually die from the effects of our words and music. It isn't an easy thing to create, the right sound at the proper volume. People actually collapsing in pain. They'd come there knowing full well. People dying from the effects of all this beauty and power. That's art, sweetheart. I make it happen.

Mr. Niles: At this point I suspect you're only being half-serious.

BW: Which half?

Mr. Bakey: You're not saying, or are you, that the only thing you do is make loud noises and this is what explains the Wunderlick formulation or ethos. BW: My whole life is tinged with melancholy. The more I make people move, the closer I get to personal inertness. With everybody jumping the way they do and holding their heads in the manner they're inclined to hold their heads, I feel in kind of a mood of melancholy because I myself am kind of tired of all the movement and would like to flatten myself against a wall and become inert. Miss Hall: Quite so.

Mr. Bradley: I wonder if you'd like to discuss the origin and meaning of the phrase pee-pee-maw-maw. I know it's traceable to you and it seems to be sweeping the country at the moment. Everywhere I go, and I do extensive traveling, I see people wearing shirts and trousers with those little syllables on them, not to mention seeing pee-pee-maw-maw on shopping bags, buttons, decals, bumper stickers, and even hearing dolls say it over and over, five-dollar talking dolls that say that phrase over and over. I know it's all traceable to you and I just wonder what it all signifies, if anything. BW: Childhood incantation. Mr. Bakey: Ah.

Mrs. Olmstead: Perhaps you'd care to elaborate. BW: As a little kid in the street I used to hear older kids saying it. It's one of the earliest memories of my life. Older kids playing in the street at night. I'd be on the stoop or watching from a window. Too little to play with the older kids. Summer nights on the street in New York. Very early memory. These kids chanting to each other. Pee-pee-maw-maw. I don't think anybody knew what it meant or where it came from. Probably twelfth century England or the Vikings or the Moors. These kids chanting it on the street. Pee-pee-maw-maw. Pee-pee-maw-maw. Chants like that can be traced to the dawn of civilization. Like games kids play can be traced a thousand years back to kids in India. Same with incantations. It's an interesting subject. You should schedule it.