"Dead wrong."

"At least you could give me the mountain tapes. If you handed over the mountain tapes, I'd at least have something to play with."

"How's my band?" I said.

"The boys are confused. What can I say? The boys are confused, hurt and bereaved."

"Azarian's not bereaved. He's doing his little hip-flips right out front."

"With him everything's on the surface. He doesn't give it that extra level. I think they'll break up."

"Not for a while."

"Who needs them?" he said.

"They're valuable as artifacts."

"Bucky Wunderlick. That's what people want. In the flesh."

"I have to get some rest now."

"You're kicking me out. Listen, why not? It's been an emotion-packed twenty-four hours and you desperately need sleep. It stands to reason."

"Tell Lepp to get rid of this building."

"It's a business thing," he said. "Diversification, expansion, maximizing the growth potential. Someday you'll understand these things. You'll open your mind to these things. Someday you'll be thirty years of age and you'll have to go out and make an honest living, ho, hike the rest of us."

"Never," I said.

"Ho, the ageless wonder. But what I wish you'd do is, talking of time and tide, is I wish you'd go back to writing lyrics, real lyrics the way you used to write them and sing them. That would amaze and delight the whole world, Bucky. A surprise return to your old self. There was nobody better at it."

"When are you leaving, Glob?"

"He throws me out right to my face. A spontaneous put-down. He is famous for this kind of thing but I stand here and take it because it has been an emotion-packed twenty-four hours and he is a star of the firmament while I am only his personal manager who took him out of the rain when he was a scrawny kid and made him what he is today, an even scrawnier kid. But just so you don't think I'm not appreciative of what you've been doing in the later stages, normal lyrics or no normal lyrics, I want you to know a few weeks ago wherever I was in the vast Southland I picked up HBQ Memphis on the car radio and they were doing 'Pee-Pee-Maw-Maw,' both sides, no commercial interruptions.