[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
It's a different book.
It looks like prose.
And I'll let people decide whether it's
prose, poetry, or whatever.
But this is a whole book of something called Bodies
And Soul: Musical Memoirs.
And this book was evoked by all of the music that
goes on around us.
From the time that we're born, we're bombarded with songs.
And music, I think, more than anything else,
is evocative of particular moments
if you could get all of the tunes you've heard or picked up
either consciously or subconsciously
from the time you were born until it's time to leave.
Like someone who's drowning, they
tell us stories about how their whole life passes before them
And I think songs can really pin a moment down.
You snap on the radio, you hear Little Anthony
and the Imperials or Martha and the Vandellas or something.
And you say, oh yeah, I remember what
I was doing when that came out.
I'd just been fired, and I was looking
for-- that kind of thing.
So this is a whole book of that sort of evocation.
The problem with writing something like that
is that I don't believe in writing
mysterious, inaccessible stuff.
I like to communicate and I like for--
theoretically, I'd like anybody just
to be able to pick up one of my books and get into it,
rather than someone who specializes
in reading literature.
And so I had to write these things,
even though in many ways they were personal,
so that other people could slip into them.
This is the kind of thing I mean.
I don't know if you-- how many people here
know who Spike Jones is or was?
Oh, OK, all right.
I don't have to explain too much.
Spike Jones used to really parody, and lampoon, and tear
things apart musically.
And there's very little instance of parody in our lives,
in American lives now.
What passes for parody in our time, or in our culture,
anyway, I've noticed tends to be the kind of thing
that the National Lampoon does or what Saturday Night
Live does or shows like that.
And they don't parody life.
They parody public events, or other television shows,
or movies.
It's public things that are being parodied.
And the implication, of course, is that there
is no life to be parodied.
But back in those days, Spike Jones would just take anything.
And he took this old song, "Cocktails
For Two" which was a very staid kind of thing
from the '30s, (SINGING) in some secluded rendezvous,
(NORMAL SPEECH) that kind of thing.
And Spike would just tear them apart.
And as kids, we love that stuff.
And this is when I first got on to Spike Jones in 1946.
"Cocktails For Two, Spike Jones and his City Slickers, 1946."
"It's a fact," Bookus told me that night
as he stared through the windshield at the foggy highway
ahead and sucked on the butt end of a Camel.
"When I was a kid, I was crazy about bullshit.
Fatty Arbuckle, Andy Gump, Bob Steele, Butterbeans and Susie,
Stepin Fetchit, Tarzan, Krazy Kat and all
like that, you too young to know about it,
but we couldn't get enough of that stuff, the same
as you can't get enough of this Spike Jones."
Our destination, Chicago.
That's right, Chicago, "Ella-noise,"
as Bookus called it.
My mother, for some forgotten reason,
had packed my toothbrush, a sweater, some underwear,
pajamas, fresh britches, and funny books
and turned me loose with Bookus McGee.
With his razor line mustache, Army issue slacks,
scuffed brown zip-up leather jacket,
and greasy broad brimmed hat, Bookus
looked pretty much like the Colored version
of every second string villain you've ever
beheld in the 1940's B movie.
Except, we didn't rate them that way then.
To us, they were all just pictures.
Picture us hunched up in that "all but rusted out"
hump-backed V8 Ford with the radio playing more static
than fade.
What Bookus was doing was hauling
a load of bootleg whiskey he had distilled and bottled himself,
hauling it across southern Michigan to northern Illinois.
If any cop had stopped us, it would
have been curtains for Bookus, and no telling
what might have happened to me.
Naturally, I didn't know that then.
All I knew was we were on a weekend trip
to visit an old buddy of his who owned a gas
station, way out in the land of California, sweet home Chicago.
Chicago, as in boom chicka, boom chicka, Chi-ca-go.
And go we did.
Chugging us along, cargo and all,
was Bookus with his Camels, Bookus with his spearmint gum,
Bookus with his toothpicks, Bookus with his facial scars
from a car crash of years ago that
had gotten him off hooch, his own and anybody else's, except
to sell.
There was also Bookus who used to sing blues and play
the guitar, Bookus with his Army stories,
and Bookus with his dreams.
"Yeah," he kept saying, "all kids love bullshit."
And it was true, for I loved Bookus
with his scary tales of what had gone on before I was born
and his way of selling future [AUDIO OUT] clinks
and horns going, ooh-ga!
ooh-ga!
I fall back into the back seat of that car to grab a nap
and look at how it all started out
for me, a curious little sub-American boy,
recalling with perfect clarity the sound
of Bookus' Mississippi voice saying, "That's right.
It used to be all kids love bullshit.
Now commence to find out, grown people like it, too.
That's all you get nowadays is more and more bullshit.
You mark my words, the day is coming when bullshit
will rule this very world."
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]