So, what I learned about, all the lessons that I’ve been through, everything, from the ditch of digging worms and going up and down the creeks, from me crawling through the sewer pipes. I did this song called “I Stole This Knowledge”. I stole all of this wisdom that I obtained. I had to sneak and get it. I didn’t pay my way like everybody else. I didn’t learn through books and the institution of books. I had to turn the pages of the books that I found thrown away in the alleys or books that I found up and down the ditches or something that somebody threw away at the state fair ground.1 I had to find that knowledge through laying on my back on the top of the house, because they told me to get the hell out of the house, that I was too young to hear what was going on in the house. And I built me a little bitty place up on top of the house, and took the speakers from the drive-in and brought them through the sewer pipe with a telephone line.

And I had stereo speakers I lay between, and I looked at all those movies.2 I stole that knowledge looking at those movies and hearing them. I didn’t have to really steal looking at the movie, because the drive-in theater was so big and I could see it. But to hear it, I had to go through the sewer pipe, I had to take the speakers off the post. I had to bring them up on top of the house at five years old. And I had — that’s the way I got the sound. Everybody said why did you get all that sound from where — how do you know how to sing like this, and how do you know how to sing like that? I got it from the Rock-Ola in the house, that was a jukebox. I got it from listening to all of those songs over and over and over.3

1. Grand Exaggeration, Have To Live, Life Of The Intellect, Literary World, Take You Into Other Worlds, Thorough Diagnosis [↩]
2. Self Financing [↩]
3. History Is A Construct [↩]