JC Well, yeah. I was thinking one time about creating weather by using music. TW Creating weather? JC Yes, or, um, altering the temperature of the, uh, of this room for instance, by playing a certain kind of music. I got to thinking. In brain surgery they use ultrasonics for cutting and, uh, cutting away tissue. And the way they do that is cut the tissue with a heating process. They heat up the tissue and I think it’s high frequencies that create heat in, uh, matter. Now, an example of the low frequencies, the effects that low frequencies tend to have is, um, they’re made up of pulses and movements of columns of air. So that an example of an extremely low frequency would be a hurricane or a whirlwind. And in France a person, a professor in France has studied with a death ray machine which uses, uh, propels very low sounds. He has this organ pitch pipe which is 130 or several hundred feet long and, uh, when they tested it out they almost killed a lot of people in the factory where they were using it. He got in a lot of trouble. A lot of people were sick. They only turned it on for maybe a minute and a half and it made everything vibrate rapidly. So, um, what I was thinking was, uh, I’ve been writing music… The music I was writing about six years ago consisted of instruction for performance such as, “Follow the wind and listen to it.” That was one that I wrote. The idea was to listen to the wind and whistling between houses, et cetera, and all the variations of sound. And some of the things I’ve been finding out about in electronics seem to suggest that it is possible to produce by sound, to alter the temperature, to make the air around you warmer or cooler, uh, according to which combination of pitches you use. And, um, I’d like to have a tape, you know, for if you wanted to create a seventy-five-degree temperature, then you play this tape or whatever. Uh, and over a period of days you could have
a tape which regulated the heat around you. The kind of heat it would give off would be in some cases like autumn, winter, et cetera. TW It’d be great to have on a date. JC Yeah. TW You could, uh, like take a girl on a trip to the South Seas just by playing a record. [Laughs.] too much. For an enemy, you could burn up his brain. [Laughs.] Here’s Nico, who has been playing with you on your first LP, the Velvet Underground and Nico and a very haunting song, ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror.’ [Song plays.] ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror.’ Nico singing with the Velvet Underground. You know something? After what you just told me, the exposition on using records to create temperature, I think that every DJ in the United States is going to think twice before he says, “Well, here’s a hot record for you folks.” [Laughs.] He might just be right. Burn down the town radio station. Here’s Tim Hardin for you though, he’s always cool. [Song-‘If I Were a Carpenter’-plays.] Yeah, about those birds that flew over, those pigeons. It all goes to prove the power of positive thinking. I did go out there and I looked up and fifty thousand pigeons did a wonderful job on our building. It’s great. They were very Baroque, with just a touch of Neorealism here and there. I like that. So, we’ll be back next week all sparkly and shiny. Our guests were the Velvet Underground, playing excerpts like ‘White Light’, ‘The Gift’, and ‘Lady Godiva’ from their new album, White Light/White Heat, and good luck on your piano-Lou Reed got a new ninetyfive dollar piano-and good luck with all your unpronounceable Oriental instruments and those new ideas. I’m Tom Wilson and my producer is H.H. Calwin.
Lou Reed at the Castle at 2630 Glendower Avenue in Los Angeles, May, 1966
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