Don DeLillo (20 page)

“What material do I perform?”

“You’re about to ask what material you perform for all these concerts weeks on end with totally different groups. Bucky, it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference. You can jam, you can whistle, you can hum, you can do top-forty AM schlock, you can just stand there and shout at the audience. It doesn’t make any difference what you do. The idea is to get you out there, get the whole mystique going again, make them wet their pants, make them yell and scream. Jam. That’s what I say. Tap the mike and start picking. Do twenty minutes’ guitar work and get the hell off. Make loud sounds, that’s the thing. Move your lips, that’s even better. Stand there and move your lips. Don’t think of it as a performance. Think of it as an appearance. You’re back on the road, that’s the thing we’re concerned about. Twenty minutes and run for the airport. You pick up one group in one city, zoom over to another city and another group, hit a third city and a third group, jump into a fourth city and pick up the original group there. We build up incredible interest this way.”

“And the day after my funeral you release the tapes.”

“You can’t wait to get out there. Admit it, Bucky. You know the truth about the tour. You know you need the tour. It won’t be long. Six or eight weeks, more or less. Then
we
release the material on the tapes. Then you hit the road for six or eight more weeks. A two-record set. Early spring release. Obvious title:
The Mountain Tapes.
We’d be crazy to call it anything else since that’s the name everybody knows it by. Right now we’re culling. We’re editing down to twenty cuts. Getting rid of tape hiss and other noises. Snipping and clipping. Moving things around. Making up titles. Mixing in some instrumental work on about three quarters of the cuts. The thing’s going to be rough as hell. But I think that’s what we need right now. We’ve had enough of instant phasing and sixteen track and synthesizers. The people want something plain. Plain but complicated. The kind of material you and only you can deliver. I don’t go in for levels in popular music and I don’t even know if this is level-material or not. Maybe that’s the power of it. Is it one level or two levels or no levels at all? Are the levels simple levels or profound levels? That’s the power of the mountain tapes as I view it from my own particular viewpoint. It’s not my sound. It’s not the sound I listen to when I look across the river from my bedroom window on a summer night and my wife is sitting up in bed reading the Eastern teachers and there’s moonlight on the river and the great rotting towers of Manhattan are arrayed across the night and I turn off the air conditioner and open a window and insert a cartridge in my music system. Your sound frankly isn’t the sound I listen to at times like that. But it’s a valid sound and it should sell by the carload. So right now we’re culling and mixing and refining. The technical minds are hard at work. We aim for early spring. Definitely a two-record set. Positively called
The Mountain Tapes.”

“First pressing of a hundred million billion,” I said.

“I’m in the middle of arrangements for the tour. Everybody’s working on it here. Late nights, weekends, quickie lunches. It’ll be unprecedented, Bucky. Give me a few days to work out the second tour. Then well talk again. I’ve got tour one just about nailed down. Then we have to do some coordinating. Then we have to work out chart cities versus test cities. It’s a valid sound. No doubt about it. I’ll tell you where you’ll be traveling the first time around. You want to hear? I’ve got the list right here marked confidential in big red letters.”

“Not now,” I said.

“The third, a Wednesday, Atlanta. Fourth, Memphis. Fifth, San Antonio. Sixth, Dallas. Seventh, New Orleans. Eighth, Albuquerque. Ninth, L.A. Tenth, Portland. Twelfth, Seattle. Thirteenth, Portland. Fourteenth, Tampa. Jacksonville the fifteenth. Miami the sixteenth, a Tuesday. Milwaukee the seventeenth. Flint the eighteenth. Grand Rapids the nineteenth. Grand Rapids the twentieth. Long Beach the twenty-first. Phoenix the twenty-second. Emporia twenty-third. Oneonta twenty-fifth. Cortland twenty-fifth. Brockton twenty-sixth. Toronto twenty-seventh. London twenty-eighth. Salt Lake City thirty-first. Lubbock the first, a Thursday. Houston on two. Galveston on three. Baton Rouge on four. Nashville on five. Memphis on six. Chattanooga on seven. Knoxville on eight. Alliance the tenth. Millersburg the eleventh. Ripley the twelfth. Bradford the thirteenth. Wellsboro the fourteenth. Hazelton the sixteenth. Woodland the seventeenth. Calistoga the eighteenth. Clover-dale the nineteenth. San Francisco the twentieth, a Tuesday, fog rolling in, sea gulls sitting on the pilings.”

The Mountain Tapes

Press Preview and Record Industry Orientation

Edited transcript of lyrics
—
Tape 4

Prepared by Esme Taylor Associates

in collaboration with Pulse Redactor Co.

DIVISIONS OF TRANSPARANOIA

15: Near and far

Night so high

Water falling

Water falling

Night so high

Water falling

Night so high

Water falling

Water falling

Water falling

Near and far

Water falling

Near and far

Night so high

Water falling

Water falling

16: Dadmom sis

Driving in the black car

Dadmom sis

Sighting on the white line

Long come something

In a blinding light

Long gone something

In a blinding light

Dead all dead

Oooh all dead

Bloody foot

Bloody head

Eat the nose for Christmas

Eat the toes for Lent

Eat the car for Eat-A-Car

Send the bones to Kent

17: Roses roses never red

Sweet the buzzard sings

Tell me tell me tell me

Time weather seasons

Story tell

Lesson give

Maiden words to learn

Being young restores the god

That eats itself

That eats itself

Better than the feast that ends

When they pick us from their teeth

Tell me tell me tell me

Cloud that’s making

Less of sky

That more of flying

Tries to make

Down the wind it comes

Something flying down the wind

Time weather seasons

Maiden words to learn

Standing sitting

Strip by strip

I pick the skin from off my face

Becoming god

Begin to glow

Behead the rose

Better than the feast that ends

When they pick us from their teeth

Tell me tell me tell me

Roses roses never red

Soft the vulture croons

18: I was born with all languages in my mouth

Baba

Baba

Baba

This and that

Egramine and woe

Sandwords on mud

High taljonics

Everything ever spoken shines from my teeth

Baba

Baba

Baba

Halda Ny Wadji

Hilda Krywicki

Mildred Hayes

Bionongenics

Mambo magic

Oh oh oh oh

Mambo madness

Oh oh oh oh

Dancing on a Latin balcony

Swaying to a starry symphony

Mambo mania

Oh oh oh oh

Undreamed grammars float in my spittle

Baba

Baba

Baba

Gadung gadung gadung

Uma childa nobo

Distiptics in wine

Insane today

I was born with all languages in my mouth

Baba

Baba

Baba

Nothing-maker

But to blurt

But to sing

Baby god and goo

19: Nighttime come

Mountain dark

Treetop wind

Mad dog bark

20: I know my toes

One to ten

This one’s big

This one’s no

Big one big

No one no

I know my toes

One to ten

I touch my hand

One touch one

One is touching

One is touched

Touching touching

Hand touch hand

I touch my hand

My hand touch me

I smell my nose

I smell my nose

I know my toes

I touch my hand

I smell my nose

I close my mouth

DO NOT QUOTE WITHOUT PERMISSION

IN A MILLENNIUM
or two, a seeming paradox of our civilization will be best understood by those men versed in the methods of counter-archaeology. They will study us not by digging into the earth but by climbing vast dunes of industrial rubble and mutilated steel, seeking to reach the tops of our buildings. Here they’ll chip lovingly at our spires, mansards, turrets, parapets, belfries, water tanks, flower pots, pigeon lofts and chimneys.

I turned south on Broadway.

Scaling our masonry they will identify the encrustations of twentieth-century art and culture, decade by decade, each layer simple enough to compare with the detritus at ground level — our shattered bank vaults, cash registers, safes, locks, electrified alarm systems and armored vehicles. Back in their universities in the earth, the counter-archaeologists will sort their reasons for our demise, citing as prominent the fact that we stored our beauty in the air, for birds of prey to see, while placing at eye level nothing more edifying than hardware, machinery and the implements of torture.

Hanes was sitting in the last car on the downtown local. The package angled out of an airline bag between his feet. I sat next to him, drawing a tap on the wrist. The noise was devastating, a series of bending downriver screams. Conversing I tilted my head and spoke directly into his ear. There were four or five other people in the car. Hanes looked weak and sick, a reproduction of my image in the mirror when I first arrived at Great Jones and cut myself shaving.

“What do you want?” I said.

“There’s a rumor you’re in New York living in an old building on some obscure street. Seriously, that’s the strongest rumor about you right now. I’ve been to enough places lately to know which rumors are current and choice. I’ve been through so many time zones I’m almost bodiless.”

“What places?”

“Literally or figuratively?” he said. “Literally about fifteen cities in three countries. Thought I had a sure sale at one point. Not quite, as it turned out. Question of ethics, they said. Time zones nearly did me in. I couldn’t write my name on a traveler’s check. Ì couldn’t add simple figures. That was the literal journey I took. Figuratively I lived in a lamasery in Tibet, being guided through the mysteries of the highest level of death. That’s what my whole vacation was about. Death-in-life. A string of make-believings. I moved through progressions of passive trains of thought. Nobody wanted to use me. I was prepared to be used. I did everything but take out ads in the newspapers. It was all a mistake. I’m meant to ride elevators floor to floor. More than that requires the mettle of demigods like yourself. I’m meant to crouch in stairwells reading interoffice mail. There’s a tremendous lure to becoming bodiless. I see it but fear it. It’s like a junkie’s death. A junkie’s death is beautiful because it’s so effortless.”

Hanes insisted on changing trains every few stops. We spent the afternoon this way, shouting into each other’s head, standing on platforms, hurrying through barren tunnels, altering our level of descent from train to train. In the last car again, somewhere beneath the ruck of Red Hook, we saw a boy and two girls steal a sleeping derelict’s shoes. The man stirred, then curled more tightly into the bouncing seat. Opening the door between cars, the three children headed for the heart of the train.

“Too young to understand the dignity of shoes,” Hanes said.