Authors: Great Jones Street
Scratching out a life
Sound is hard to child-bear
Skin inked black
Turning into burning thing
Circling into wordtime
Sounds I see
Breaking through the hard light
Razor notes
Close to someone’s throat
Re-ject
Is the mark along the arm
Long-play
Is the enemy
“Cold War Lover”
Words-and-music Bucky Wunderlick
Copyright
©
1969 Teepee Music
All rights administered Transparanoia Inc.
“Protestant Work Ethic Blues”
Words-and-music Wunderlick-Azarian
Copyright © 1970 Teepee Music
All rights administered Transparanoia Inc.
“Diamond Stylus”
Words-and-music Bucky Wunderlick
Copyright © 1970 Teepee Music
All rights administered Transparanoia Inc.
Complete transcript of interview conducted by Steven Grey, editor-in-chief of
Ibex,
a Journal of Rock Art.
GREY:
Hey, man, glad you could make it over. Just like to start off the proceedings by asking a couple or three questions about the mountain tapes. Are you figuring to just sit on this material or is there a release date for this material or what? It’s been a long time between releases and people are starting to wonder about that and in a business like our business you hear all kinds of things and I wanted to start off by asking straight out …
WUNDERLICK:
(garbled)
GREY:
Could you try to aim your words right at the thing there? Where you going? Hey, man, where you going?
WUNDERLICK:
(garbled)
GREY:
Hey, man. Aw, hey. Aw, come on back, man. Aw, no. Aw, hey. We just got … we just … aw, man, no.
Feature story, reprinted in its entirety, from
Celebrity Teen,
volume 19, number 8, copyright © 1971 by Star System Inc., all rights reserved, reprinted by permission.
ROCK STAH REVEALS SWEATER FETISH!!!
by Carmela Bevilacqua
After I’d interviewed hard-to-interview Bucky Wunderlick in his spectacular mountain retreat overlooking a shimmering lake in the rugged, scenic Adirondacks, I came away feeling just a mite dazed by his gentleness and quiet charm. After all, the supercharged world of rock ‘n’ roll isn’t my usual beat, in addition to which everybody knows how difficult and temperamental Bucky is supposed to be, so imagine how delightfully surprised I was by his feather-soft nature. In fact it was a day full of surprises, including a strange and bizarre visit from an unexpected guest.
But to get back to the beginning, maybe “interview” is the wrong word. Bucky didn’t actually answer any of my questions. Formal answers, no. But talk to me he certainly did! Nodding his head slowly at my queries about his personal and professional life, Bucky chatted slowly and with a kind of sleepy charm about his dreams and his fears, about music and love and poetry, about people, oceans, streets and trees. Such was the hypnotic quality of his voice that at times it was difficult to catch what he was saying. Sometimes his voice would drop away to a whisper and other times he just seemed to ramble on, stringing words together in an aimless pattern. As Bucky talked, his lady of the hour drifted in and out, occasionally joining the conversation. Since you’re probably dying to know, I won’t waste any time telling you that she’s slim and dusty-blond, and she goes by the name of Mazola June. (“They named me after the corn oil,” she said in a lil ole drawl of a voice.) After she drifted off thataway, I asked Bucky to fill in the details on this female friend of marriageable age.
“We’re running death sprints,” he said mysteriously, and although I tried to prod him on the subject of marriage in the near future and the possibility of children and a life far removed from the tawdry glitter, he never returned to the subject of his pretty (and private) companion.
It was about this time that one of Bucky’s ever-present aides, flunkies or what-have-you came slouching in to report that “some creep” had breached security and was hanging around in the hall outside, hoping to be granted an audience with the star himself. Bucky replied with a shrug and the intruder was ushered in. He was a smallish, pale man and he looked directly into Bucky’s eyes, spoke four sentences and then left without waiting for a reply.
“What you have to teach is greater than our capacity to learn. You must stop so we can understand what you’ve been doing. I’ve come a thousand miles to see you. Now begins the long wait until you come to me.”
Later, Bucky and I watched the sun sink into the lake in a riotous blaze of color. I asked him about his obviously undeserved reputation for controversy and mayhem, and when he made no reply other than a clown’s sad smile, I wondered aloud how difficult it must be for him to occupy the stormy heights of his profession, how hard to endure the constant stress of being number one in a business where the roadside is strewn with casualties.
“Wear sweaters,” Bucky said softly in the fading glow of twilight, sitting just a yard away from me on the spacious patio behind the house in the gathering chill. “Sweaters absorb the major impact. I wear three and sometimes four sweaters everywhere I go, weather permitting. Not on stage. I’m not talking about on stage. On stage you’ve got to be naked at the moment of impact. That’s the moment of ultimate truth and ultimate falsehood, and the only way to go is go naked. Off stage, I wear sweaters. One on top of the other. All kinds. Three and four and sometimes five sweaters.”
Mazola June came out then, wrapped in the longest scarf I’ve ever seen in my life, and before too long they’d both nodded off to dreamy sleep, right there in front of me, a pair of babes in the northern wood.
Title track from
PEE-PEE-MAW-MAW
Recorded on Anspar Records & Tapes
International copyright secured
Pee-Pee-Maw-Maw
Blank mumble blat
Babble song babble song
Foaming at the mouth
Won, ton soupie
Spit gargle retch
Easter bunny juke puke
Family zoo me and you
Moo moo moo
The beast is loose Least is best Pee-pee-maw-maw
The beast is loose
Least is best
Pee-pee-maw-maw
Nil nully void
Biting down on hankychiffs
Where’s the end round this bend
Scream dream baby
Boo holler hoot
Picking on the ear string
Cut a slice of steel guitar
Spang bang clang
The beast is loose
Least is best
Pee-pee-maw-maw
The beast is loose
Least is best
Pee-pee-maw-maw
Pee-pee-maw-maw
“Pee-Pee-Maw-Maw”
Words-and-music Bucky Wunderlick
Copyright © 1971 Teepee Music
All rights administered Transparanoia Inc.
Material not to be offered for resale.
None of the copyrighted material herein is to be published in any form whatsoever without written permission from Transparanoia Inc., 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York 10020.
Copyright secured under the Port Moresby, Pan American, International, World and Universal copyright conventions.
Public performance rights for U.S. and Canada owned by Teepee Music, an affiliate of Transparanoia Inc. All other world rights owned by Chumley Productions, an affiliate of Transparanoia Inc.
Made in U.S.A.
All rights reserved.
Officially registered and legally restricted.
WHEN
I
LIVED
in the mountains I had a special room built into the studio portion of my house. It was an anechoic chamber, absolutely soundproof and free of vibrations. The whole room was bedded on springs and lined with fiberglass baffles that absorbed all echo. There I listened to tapes of my own material, both in transition stage and final form. Music was a liquid presence in that chamber, invisible wine for the ear to taste. I used the room often but not always to play the tapes. Sometimes I just sat there, wedged in a block of silence, trying to avoid the feeling that time is stretchable. The small room seemed a glacial waste, bounded only by solid materials, subject to no central thesis, far more frighteningly immaculate than it was when pure music skated from the tapes. If you could stretch a given minute, what would you find between its unstuck components? Probably some kind of astral madness. A bleak comprehension of the final size of things. The room yielded no real secrets, of course, and provided no more than a hint of the nature of silence itself. There was always something to hear, even in that shaved air, the earth roiling into a turn, cells in my body answering to war.
Azarian came from Los Angeles to offer condolences. He climbed the stairs, shook hands with me, stood at the far end of the room. Somewhere along the way he had been given official word; her death was natural, coming as a result of unrelenting neglect. An acute pancreatic infection, viral pneumonia, an intestinal obstruction, a non-infectious kidney disease centered in the blood vessels of that organ. I wondered how much pain she’d endured in order to comply with her own cruel rudiments of conduct. Attrition. Let the stress of trying to live determine how you die. Ride along and hope it doesn’t hurt too much. The intransigence of an enchanted child. Loving the child, I’d been half in fear of the woman, knowing she was serious, an unbroken line defining whatever it was she’d hoped to gain or lose. Someone to measure myself against. Azarian went on to say that Globke had contacted the family and arranged for the body to be sent back home, air freight express.
“What are you doing in L.A.?” I said.
“Tremendous things. I probably shouldn’t tell you about it. In fact I’m determined not to.”
“What is it?”
“Blackness.”
“Black music?”
“Black everything,” Azarian said. “Blackness as such.”
“What’s it like being into blackness.”
“I’m not too far into it yet. But I’m making my way, little by little. I really shouldn’t be talking about it. It’s really deep, Bucky. Deep and dark. It’s pressing against me with tremendous weight, practically crushing my chest. A lot of fear is involved. All kinds of fear. It’s hard to pick out a single moment when I’m not afraid.”
“How do you get into something like blackness? Do you have to shed your whiteness first? Or do you just go hurtling forward, bang, and risk all kinds of injury, mind and body?”
“How do I get into blackness? Is that what you’re asking?”
“Can you put it in words?” I said.
“It’s a street thing. Blackness is a street thing. It’s the self-identification of the people on the street. Watts is a whole big bunch of streets. Same with Bed-Stuy. Harlem, it’s not so much the streetness of Harlem, it’s more the history and the badness of the vibes. Black is baddest in the best sense. I mean that’s where you have to go to make sense of the magic of existence. You pass through all that streetness and weight and terror and you come out a more dimensional person.”
“But how do you get into blackness, being nonblack?”
“I can’t put it in words,” he said.
I pointed toward a chair but he said he preferred to stand. He seemed to avoid looking directly at me. The curse in the eyes of the bereaved. I watched puddles form under his boots as a series of tiny ice slides occurred.
“How’s the band?”
“We’re laying down vocals,” he said. “Still plenty of contract problems though. I don’t know at this point who we’re recording for. People come in screaming at us. When are you making it back out?”
“Not yet. I’ve been set back. Have to reassemble myself.”
“Bucky, these people I represent. They’re real interested in getting their hands on the product we spoke about last time I was here.”
“Talk to Happy Valley.”
“I’m afraid to, Bucky. It’s not just fear of being physically hurt or maimed for Me. It’s the whole idea of who they are that scares me.”
“Who are they?”
“You know that better than I do. You’ve been in touch with them. They hired Opel to deal for them. At this late date you know more about them than I do. In other words you’re the one that should talk to them. I know you’re in mourning or whatever the hip equivalent of mourning is. So obviously you’ve got other things on your mind and I appreciate the fact that if you don’t want to do business right now, there’s a time and place. But if I go in there and talk to Happy Valley on my own, anything and everything might and can happen, especially since there’s been a split in their own ranks.”
“That makes things more interesting,” I said. “You can play one side against the other.”
“Are you crazy? I wouldn’t get involved in anything like that. Are you crazy?”
“Why don’t you stick to music then?”
“I am sticking to music, Bucky. Being into blackness the way I am, I’m getting interested in root forms of rock ‘n’ roll. I’m beginning to delve real deep in that area. But I also have this other part of my life that I’m trying to find a place for. There’s so much to be afraid of in contemporary society. I’m establishing a permanent relationship with these people I’ve mentioned on the Coast in order, among other things, to examine and find the sources of my own fear. Together we’ve come up with a plan whereby you with your influence and mystique can make an offer to the Happy Valley Farm Commune, this or that faction, flip a coin, whoever’s got control of the product, and you can do it without letting on that I’m involved or my people on the Coast are involved or anybody’s involved except who you say the involved party is. Do you want to hear the details?”