Miss Halclass="underline" 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. MissHalclass="underline" 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.
Mr. Fielder: For my closing remarks, which I promise you will be kept as brief as humanly possible, given the pronounced oratorical bias of your speaker and chairman, I'd like simply to say that this has been a most dynamic round table, surely for me a most instructive one as well, as it was I believe for all of us gathered here, although each no doubt has his or her own idea of levels of merit, remembering our own Turner Bakey and his oft-quoted rejoinder to Ed-dings' paraphrase of Larue during the Arts-Leadership Committee's brunch on genocide. At any rate, thanks one and all. And now for a dip in the pool.
•
Three tracks from
diamond stylus
Recorded on Anspar Records amp; Tapes
International copyright secured
Cold War Lover