Narrator: There he lies. God rest his soul, and his rudeness. A devouring public can now share the remains of his sickness, and his phone numbers. There he lay: poet, prophet, outlaw, fake, star of electricity. Nailed by a peeping tom, who would soon discover...
Jude: A poem is like a naked person...
Narrator: even the ghost was more than one person.
Arthur: ...but a song is something that walks by itself.
Why do you prefer folk music to other types of music? Because it's honest. Commercial songs, pop music can't be honest. It's controlled and censored by the people who run society and make the rules.
Hell, I don't pick what I sing. It picks me. Some of it ain't pretty. I mean, how you ever gonna change anything if you only wanna show what's pretty?
So, as long as folk remained strictly a minority taste, it would always be us against the big, bad commercial tastelessness.
You don't have to write anything down to be a poet. Some work in gas stations. Some shine shoes. I don't really call myself one because I don't like the word. Me? I'm a trapeze artist.
I am present at the birth of my thought. I watch and I listen. I draw a stroke of the bow. A symphony stirs in the depths, or comes with a leap to the stage. It began with waves of disgust and it ends... as we can't immediately seize this eternity...it ends with a riot of perfumes.
Sighting it and hearing it and breathing it in; rubbing it all in the pores of my skin. And the wind between my eyes, milk and honey in my comb.
Nothing but a fake neurotic crawling through the gutter.
-Have you got a word for your fans?
-Uh, astronaut.
-You know, we all have our own definitions of all those words. "Care" and "people"...
-Well, I think we all know the definition of people.
-Yeah. Do we?
-Well, is it your belief, then, that folk music has, perchance, failed to achieve its goals with the Negro cause or the cause of peace?
-You know, saying 'cause of peace', it's like saying, 'hunk of butter', you know, I don't want you to listen to anybody who wants you to believe is dedicated to the hunk and not the butter.
-I'm not sure I follow.
-You know, I didn't come out of some cereal box. There's no one out there who's gonna be converted by a song.
All these people, you know, sitting around being offended by their own meaninglessness.
-So you dated her, did you?
-Never. That girl's trouble.
-Will you invite her to the party?
-Sure. I always invite trouble.
-Some might be persuaded to doubt his sincerity.
-Well, who said I was sincere?
-Are you saying you're not sincere?
-No more than you, you know? See, you just want me to say what you want me to say.
I accept chaos. I'm not sure whether it accepts me.
Sleep! I ain't sleepin'. Sleep's for dreamers. I haven't slept in 30 days, man. Takes a lot of medicine to keep up this pace.
Good and evil were invented by people trapped in scenes.
Death can be the result of the most underrated things.
-His vitals are stable. What he needs is sleep.
-I couldn't do that. Decay like that. That's nature's will, and I'm against nature. I don't dig nature at all.
-I don't think he can get back on stage.
He's gotten inside so many psyches, and death is just such a part of the American scene right now. It's the reds that make him mean.
The only truly natural things are dreams, which nature cannot touch with decay.
Jude: Doesn't really matter, you know, what kind of nasty names people invent for the music. But, uh, folk music is just a word, you know, that I can't use anymore. What I'm talking about is traditional music, right, which is to say it's mathematical music, it's based on hexagons. But all these songs about, you know, roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans are turning into angels – I mean, you know, they're not going to die. They're not folk music songs. They're political songs. They're already dead. You'd think that these traditional music people would – would gather that mystery, you know, is a traditional fact, you know, seeing as they're all so full of mystery.
Keenan Jones: And contradictions.
Jude: Yeah, contradictions.
Keenan Jones: And chaos.
Jude: Yes, it's chaos, clocks, and watermelons – you know, it's – it's everything. These people actually think I have some kind of, uh, fantastic imagination. It gets very, uh … lonesome. But traditional music is just, uh … it's too unreal to die. It doesn't need to be protected. You know, I mean, in that music is the only true valid death you can feel today, you know, off a record player. But like everything else in great demand, people try to own it. Has to do with, like, uh, the purity thing. I think its meaninglessness is holy. Everybody knows I'm not a folk singer.
Billy the Kid: People are always talking about freedom. Freedom to live a certain way, without being kicked around. 'Course, the more you live a certain way, the less it feel like freedom. Me, I can change during the course of a day. I wake and I'm one person, when I go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else. I don't know who I am most of the time.
It's like you got yesterday, today and tomorrow, all in the same room. There's no telling what can happen.
HD
