Lyrics

Takin’ care of business, and workin’ overtime

Posted on by brucehhackett

A few years ago, Hack’s Back Pages took a look back at some of the jobs various future rock stars held before they hit the big time. I wanted to show how even future musical celebrities did stints at thankless jobs, and that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Whether you earn a living at a high-paying profession in medicine, law or banking, or at a more modest-paying job in service work or manual labor, or somewhere in between, these are all honorable occupations that make up the fabric of our national economy.

It occurred to me that I had never gotten around to compiling a playlist of songs about occupations. I expected my research would turn up several dozen candidates among the classic rock archives, but I was surprised to find pickings were few. Still, I think the 14 songs I’ve chosen here are solid, and the honorable mention list isn’t too bad either. There is, as always, a Spotify playlist at the end for you to listen as you read.

If your profession isn’t represented here, perhaps you can find a song that fits the bill and pass it along to me. Off to work!

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“Please Mister Postman,” The Marvelettes, 1961

Being a mail carrier can be a tough job. You’re threatened by dogs, you have to trudge through snow and rain, and you often are the bearer of bad tidings. But sometimes you get to make someone’s day with a long-awaited letter from a loved one. At least, you did back in the days when people still sent love letters! That’s what this golden oldie by The Marvelettes is all about. “Please, Mister Postman, look and see, /Is there a letter in your bag for me? /’Cause it’s been a mighty long time, since I heard from this boyfriend of mine…” It ended up as Motown Records’ first #1 single in late 1961, and The Marvelettes charted six more Top 20 tunes in their decade-long career (“Beechwood 4-5789,” “Playboy,” “Don’t Mess With Bill”). The Beatles covered “Please Mister Postman” in 1963, and The Carpenters’ rendition in 1975 also reached #1.

“Ice Cream Man,” Tom Waits, 1973

Waits is one of the most eclectic songwriters of the past half-century, with lyrics that swing between tender, morose, vicious and hilarious. On his marvelous 1973 debut LP “Closing Time,” one of the tracks he offered was this tribute to the fellow who sells ice cream from a truck that cruises through neighborhoods. This guy, though, seems to be interested in offering something more salacious than drumsticks and creamsicles: “Baby, missed me in the alley, baby, don’t you fret, /Come back around and don’t forget, /When you’re tired and you’re hungry and you want something cool, /Got something better than a swimming pool, /’Cause I’m the ice cream man, I’m a one-man band, /I’m the ice cream man, honey, I’ll be good to you…”

“Don’t Pay the Ferryman,” Chris de Burgh, 1982

This eerily dramatic tune, written and recorded by British rocker Chris de Burgh, seems to disparage the honesty of the man who skippers the ferry boat: “In the rolling mist, then he gets on board, now there’ll be no turning back, /Beware that hooded old man at the rudder, and then the lightning flashed and the thunder roared, /Don’t pay the ferryman, don’t even fix a price, /Don’t pay the ferryman until he gets you to the other side…” I’m sure most ferry boat captains are honorable, but not in this song. In the UK, de Burgh has had a long and mostly successful run, from 1974 to the present day, with nearly two dozen albums in the Top 40. “Ferryman” cracked the Top 40 in the US, the first of only two to make the charts here (1986’s “Lady in Red” was a huge #1 hit).

“Paperback Writer,” The Beatles, 1966

In their early years, Lennon and McCartney wrote relatively simple songs about love and boy-girl relationships, but soon enough, McCartney found he enjoyed writing lyrics about other subjects, and fictional characters. As The Beatles were working on their magnificent “Revolver” album, Paul came up with this catchy tune about a struggling writer who wanted more than anything to be a published author. He wrote it in such a way that listeners couldn’t help rooting for the guy to succeed: “If you really like it, you can have the rights, it could make a million for you overnight, /If you must return it, you can send it here, but I need a break, and I want to be a paperback writer…” It became yet another #1 hit single for The Beatles in the summer of 1966.

“Lawyers, Guns and Money,” Warren Zevon, 1978

The late great Zevon loved to write about sketchy characters — outliers, criminals, people living on the fringes. On his “Excitable Boy” LP, his commercial peak, he finished the album with a track he said was based on a true story. “My manager and I were partying in Mexico, and we took the party on the road into a creepy area of town,” he recalled. “My manager held an imaginary phone to his mouth and said, ‘Send lawyers.’ I immediately added, ‘And guns. And money!'” The song reinforces the importance of having a good lawyer when you run into trouble: “I was gambling in Havana, I took a little risk, /Send lawyers, guns and money, Dad, get me out of this… Now I’m hiding in Honduras, I’m a desperate man, /Send lawyers, guns and money, the shit has hit the fan…”

“Salesman,” The Monkees, 1967

Craig Smith was an L.A.-based singer/songwriter in the mid-’60s who recorded with Chris Ducey as Chris & Craig and later as Penny Arkade. He wrote songs that were recorded by Andy Williams, Glen Campbell and others. He befriended Michael Nesmith of The Monkees, who selected one of Smith’s songs for inclusion on the group’s 1967 LP, “Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.” Nesmith sang lead vocals on “Salesman,” Smith’s catchy tune that explored the world of the hard-working traveler peddling his wares: “Salesman, with your wooden cart that you push along while you walk, /Hey, salesman, got a little dog whose tail wags when you talk, /You always wear a smile, even though you’ve gotta walk ten miles, short lifespan, good-time salesman…”

“The Doctor,” The Doobie Brothers, 1989

Tom Johnston was founder, guitarist, singer and songwriter of The Doobies for the venerable band’s first five albums, but ulcers and exhaustion forced him to the sidelines in the late ’70s while singer/songwriter Michael McDonald took over for a while. When the band returned in 1989 with the LP “Cycles” after a decade-long hiatus, Johnston was back in charge, and the hit single was a song Johnston co-wrote called, appropriately enough, “The Doctor.” In this case, he was singing not about his previous medical woes but the metaphor that “music is the doctor” that heals us: “If you ever wonder how to shake your blues, /Just follow this prescription and get the cure for what’s ailin’ you, /Music is the doctor, makes you feel like you want to, /Listen to the doctor just like you ought to, /Music is the doctor of my soul…”

“If I Were a Carpenter,” Tim Hardin, 1967

Hardin was an acclaimed folk musician/composer who came up through the Greenwich Village scene in the early ’60s, and while his own recordings weren’t particularly successful, several of his songs did well in versions recorded by others. Bobby Darin reached #8 with a cover of Hardin’s “If I Were a Carpenter,” and Johnny Cash, The Four Tops and Robert Plant also did their own renditions. On Hardin’s “Tim Hardin 2” LP, his original take on the song considers carpentry (and other similar trades) to be humble, honest work: “If I were a carpenter, and you were a lady, would you marry me anyway? Would you have my baby? /If a tinker were my trade, would you still find me? Carrying the pots I made, following behind me? /Save my love through loneliness, save my love through sorrow, /I give you my ‘only-ness,’ give me your tomorrow…”

“Millworker,” James Taylor, 1979

Taylor wrote this fine tune for the Broadway musical “Working,” which was based on the Studs Terkel book “Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do.” The track appears on Taylor’s enigmatic 1979 LP “Flag.” Biographer Mark Robowsky describes this powerful song as “a transfixing self-portrait through the tired eyes of a female laborer chained by life to her machine”: “Yes, but it’s my life that has been wasted, and I have been the fool to let this manufacturer use my body for a tool… /So may I work the mills just as long as I am able, and never meet the man whose name is on the label, /It be me and my machine for the rest of the morning, and the rest of the afternoon, and for the rest of my life…”

“Politician,” Cream, 1968

There are few professions that have worse reputations than those who pursue careers in politics. Indeed, originally, it was supposed to be a noble calling for a few years, not a lifelong career. These days, the graft and corruption seem so widespread, and people are hard-pressed to find any office holder worthy of their trust. In 1968, bassist/vocalist Jack Bruce and lyricist Pete Brown collaborated on the biting “Politician,” which appeared on Cream’s #1 album “Wheels of Fire” that year. The title character is not only untrustworthy but unsavory as well: “Hey now, baby, get into my big black car, /I wanna just show you what my politics are, /I’m a political man and I practice what I preach, /So don’t deny me, baby, not while you’re in my reach…”

“Waitress,” Emily Hackett, 2018

In her 20s, my daughter Emily spent time as a restaurant waitress, and after one particularly tough night full of demanding customers and bad tippers, she was moved to write this song about what it’s like to be a waitress. “For me,” she said, “I was not only waiting on people, I was just trying to make ends meet, waiting for my career as a songwriter to take off.” She ended up including the tune on her 2018 EP “By the Sun,” and she makes sure to tell audiences to be kind and generous to those who wait on them. “I’m at your service, I hope you enjoy it, /Come back and see me, you know where I’ll be, /Waitin’ on you, waitin’ on pay, waitin’ on tables, waiting all day, /Waitin’ on a savior to walk in this place and take me away, /Well, I’m just a waitress…”

“Teacher,” Jethro Tull, 1970

Educators are increasingly under attack these days by people who don’t seem to understand how demanding the job of a teacher can be. From kindergarten to college and beyond, teachers provide lessons, literature and learning tools to make us smarter and wiser in the ways of the world. In Jethro Tull’s classic “Teacher” from 1970’s “Benefit” album, songwriter Ian Anderson points out the importance of making time for fun: “Well, the dawn was coming, heard him ringing on my bell, /He said, ‘My name’s the teacher, or that is what I call myself, /And I have a lesson that I must impart to you, /It’s an old expression, but I must insist it’s true, /Jump up, look around, find yourself some fun, no sense in sitting there hating everyone, /No man’s an island and his castle isn’t home, /The nest is full of nothing when the bird has flown…”

“Wichita Lineman,” Glen Campbell, 1968

Songwriter Jimmy Webb recalled driving across Oklahoma one summer afternoon when he noticed a lone telephone line worker high atop a pole and thought, “What a lonely job that must be.” He was moved to write an ode to the dedicated man who does this important work, and the result was the achingly beautiful “Wichita Lineman,” which became a #3 hit in early 1969 for singer/guitarist Glen Campbell. Webb said he’d intended to write another verse “to flesh out the imagery a bit more” but he ran out of time before Campbell’s scheduled recording session: “I am a lineman for the county, and I drive the main road, /Searchin’ in the sun for another overload, /I hear you singin’ in the wire, I can hear you through the whine, /And the Wichita Lineman is still on the line…”

“Sweet Painted Lady,” Elton John, 1973

We mustn’t leave out what has been called “the world’s oldest profession.” Prostitutes, now often known as “sex workers,” have been selling their bodies for thousands of years, and while there will always be moral arguments about whether it’s an honorable occupation, millions worldwide choose this way to earn a living. Elton John did a fine job of describing the life in “Sweet Painted Lady,” which can be found on his excellent “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” LP from 1973: “So she lays down beside me again, my sweet painted lady, the one with no name, /Many have used her and many still do, there’s a place in the world for a woman like you, /Oh, sweet painted lady, seems it’s always been the same, /Getting paid for being laid, guess that’s the name of the game…”

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Honorable mention:

“Blue Collar,” Bachman-Turner Overdrive, 1973; “Cracked Actor,” David Bowie, 1973; “Cook of the House,” Wings, 1976; “Happy Nurse,” The Sugarcubes, 1992; “Someday I’ll Be a Farmer,” Melanie, 1971; “For a Dancer,” Jackson Browne, 1974; “Taxi,” Harry Chapin, 1972; “Sky Pilot,” Eric Burdon, 1968; “Highway Patrolman,” Bruce Springsteen, 1982; “I’m Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band),” The Moody Blues, 1972; “Son of a Preacher Man,” Dusty Springfield, 1968; “Banker Bets, Banker Wins,” Ian Anderson, 2012.

Somebody tell me what it’s all about

Posted on by brucehhackett

I’ve received quite a lot of response to the posts I’ve made here where I reveal the back story and true meaning behind some well-known classic rock songs.

In two installments in 2021, I explained (or let the composers explain) what the less-than-clear lyrics were really driving at, and many readers said they were surprised to learn things about songs they thought they knew. I featured songs like Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer,” Yes’s “Roundabout” and Joni Mitchell’s “Free Man in Paris,” which each have fascinating origin stories. You can read about them at these links: https://hackbackpages.com/2021/05/07/lord-do-you-know-what-i-mean/

https://hackbackpages.com/2021/07/30/were-gonna-find-out-what-its-all-about/

In the week’s post, I offer background information on eight more songs you thought you knew. This is the kind of stuff I love to research and write about, and I hope you continue to enjoy reading about them. As is customary, there is a Spotify playlist at the end so you can conveniently hear these tunes anew.

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“Baba O’Riley,” The Who, 1971

Many people think this epic track by The Who is titled “Teenage Wasteland,” from the oft-repeated line in the lyrics. But in fact, Pete Townshend came up with the title by merging the names of two people that inspired him the most at that time in his life: Meher Baba, an Indian spiritual master with hundreds of thousands of followers, and Terry Riley, an influential but obscure American composer who experimented with minimalist concepts. Both pursued the idea of oneness — the notion of one absolute deity, and music with modal repetition of one note. Townshend wrote the piece as his vision of what would happen if the spirit of Meher Baba was fed into a computer and transformed into music. The result would be Baba in the style of Riley, or “Baba O’Riley.” It was to be the leadoff track of “Lifehouse” (another rock opera to follow “Tommy”), about a Scottish family that would set out across the hinterland for London, where a divine concert was to be held. The project was aborted, but this and several other songs from it were collected for the “Who’s Next” LP in 1971. Following The Who’s performances at Woodstock and the Isle of Wight festivals in 1969, Townshend said he was disturbed to see the acres of trash and all the drug-addled teenagers which, together, comprised what he disparagingly called “teenage wasteland.”

“Fire and Rain,” James Taylor, 1970

As the song that introduced Taylor to the mainstream, “Fire and Rain” is a remarkably personal work, much more so than any of his other hits. The chorus is straightforward enough, referring to life’s balance between the good times (“I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end”) and bad times (“I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend”) he has experienced. The verses, though, are separate vignettes about different challenges he has had to face. First he agonizes over the news that his troubled friend Suzanne had committed suicide six months earlier (“Just yesterday morning, they let me know you were gone”). Then he shares how difficult it has been to recover from depression and addiction, calling out for help one day at a time: “Won’t you look down upon me, Jesus? You gotta help me make a stand, you’ve just got to see me through another day…” In verse three, he comes to grips with fame and fortune, and mentions the struggles he had in his first band, The Flying Machine, before his big break (“Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground”). He concludes with a final reference to his friend (“Thought I’d see you one more time again”) and a nod to his imminent success (“There’s just a few things coming my way this time around now…”).

“In the Air Tonight,” Phil Collins, 1981

This powerful song, full of restless anticipation, was the leadoff track and first single from Collins’s first solo LP, “Face Value,” released in 1981. It reached #1 across Europe and #2 in the UK but managed only #19 in the US. I think it’s one of his very best songs ever — sonically, melodically and lyrically. Many listeners interpreted the song’s primary couplet (“I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord, /I’ve been waiting for this moment all my life, oh Lord”) as full of hope and excitement, but in fact, Collins wrote the song amid the grief he felt after divorcing his first wife in 1980. “I had a wife, two children, two dogs, and the next day I didn’t have anything,” he said in 1981. “So songs like ‘In the Air Tonight’ reflect the fact that I was going through these difficult emotional changes.” The mood is one of restrained anger, told in words that are seriously bitter and resentful: “Well, if you told me you were drowning, I would not lend a hand… You can wipe off that grin, I know where you’ve been, /It’s all been a pack of lies…” The music builds fairly ominously until the final chorus brings an explosive burst of drums to finally release the musical tension. Originally, Collins had offered it to his bandmates in Genesis as a track for their 1980 LP “Duke,” but they chose to turn him down, a decision they later regretted, said keyboardist Tony Banks. “It’s a hell of a song,” he conceded.

“Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” Elton John, 1975

In 1968, before Elton John became popular, and before he had acknowledged (even to himself) that he was gay, he became engaged to a female friend named Linda Woodrow. She had been a fan of the music he and collaborator Bernie Taupin were writing, and the three of them were sharing a place in London’s East End. Elton and Linda weren’t intimate, and he didn’t really love her, but she was putting on the hard-court press and, having just turned 21, he figured this was the next step people took at this time in their lives. Still, he felt uneasy about it, so much so that he even made a halfhearted attempt to kill himself with a gas oven in his home. Finally, it was John’s gay friend Long John Baldry who stepped in, publicly scolding him. “What are you doing living with a fucking woman? Wake up and smell the roses. You’re gay. Hell, you love Bernie more than you love her!” He broke it off with Linda the next morning and never saw her again. Six years later, for the 1975 LP “Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy,” Taupin wrote the story of that evening as “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” with these harsh words about Linda: “You almost had your hooks in me, didn’t you dear? You nearly had me roped and tied, altar-bound, hypnotized…” Despite its 6:45 length, it reached #4 on US charts as perhaps Elton John’s most personal single of all.

“Smoke on the Water,” Deep Purple, 1972

Ian Paice, drummer for Deep Purple throughout its lengthy career arc, had this to say about the band’s most well-known song: “The amazing thing with that song, and Ritchie (Blackmore)’s riff in particular, is that somebody hadn’t done it before, because it’s so gloriously simple and wonderfully satisfying.” Indeed. Total Guitar ranked “Smoke on the Water” #4 among the Top 20 Guitar Riffs of All Time, and it’s one of the first riffs every aspiring electric guitarist learns. The track was released on their “Machine Head” album in 1972, but the song didn’t become a Top Five hit single until more than a year later. As for the words, they’re not much of a mystery, but many folks may not realize that the lyrics tell a true story. In December 1971, Deep Purple had gone to Montreux, Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Geneva, where they had planned to record their next album at the Montreux Casino complex, using the then-new Rolling Stones Mobile Studio. Unfortunately, at the venue’s final concert before closing for the season, a reckless fan of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention — “some stupid with a flare gun” — fired into the rattan-covered ceiling, which started a fire that burned the entire facility to ashes. From their hotel room across the lake, the band members could see only “smoke on the water, fire in the sky” as they watched “the biggest fire we’d ever seen.” The incident required the band to relocate to the abandoned Grand Hôtel de Territet nearby to quickly record their album in a makeshift manner. “No matter what we get out of this, I know we’ll never forget,” wrote singer/lyricist Ian Gillan.

“Shock the Monkey,” Peter Gabriel, 1980

A cursory look through the early albums in the Genesis catalog, when Gabriel was the colorful frontman, show he has a flair for fantasy and mystery, with dense lyrics that often had fans scratching their heads. This continued to a lesser extent once he went solo in 1977 with curious songs like “Solsbury Hill” and “Games Without Frontiers.” Gabriel raised the eyebrows of animal rights groups when his 1980 LP “Security” featured the song “Shock the Monkey” as its single. They overreacted to the suspicion that he was advocating using primates in objectionable laboratory tests. Gabriel dismissed these fears by explaining that it was actually a love song that examines how feelings of jealousy and rage can release our basic primal instincts. Indeed, he added that the original inspiration for the song’s lyrical motif came from, of all things, the cheesy 1962 monster film “King Kong Vs. Godzilla,” in which the enormous ape experienced a revived jolt of energy after being struck by lightning. Gabriel’s narrator warns his lover not to toy with his jealous feelings: “There is one thing you must be sure of, I can’t take any more, /Darling, don’t you monkey with the monkey, /Don’t you know you’re going to shock the monkey…”

“China Grove,” The Doobie Brothers, 1973

Early on in The Doobie Brothers’ career, they were on an extended road trip through Texas when they passed through the “blink and you’ll miss it” small town of China Grove just east of San Antonio. Songwriter Tom Johnston tucked that town’s name into his subconscious and, six months later, he retrieved it in order to write some lyrics to go with a killer riff/chords combination he’d been working on. “Most of my songs begin with the musical structure, the rhythm, the melody line,” said Johnston, “and the lyrics come later. All that middle bit about the sheriff and the samurai swords was inspired by Billy Payne’s rollicking piano parts.” Johnston came up with a tale about a few fictitious characters who lived there (“the preacher and the teacher, Lord, they’re a caution, they are the talk of the town…”), and how the town is full of “people (who) don’t seem to care, they just keep looking to the East…” Despite the town’s name and Johnston’s lyrics, fewer than 1% of the tiny population is Asian. It turns out the town was named China Grove because of a small grove of chinaberry trees that once stood near the train depot.

“Locomotive Breath,” Jethro Tull, 1971

I’ve been a fanatical follower of the music of Jethro Tull and its leader, Ian Anderson, since I first heard the debut LP “This Was” in a Cleveland record store in 1969. Once “Aqualung” was released in 1971, I was really obsessed, listening to that album every day for probably six months. “Locomotive Breath” has been a huge favorite of mine, and it became one of the two most often performed songs in the Tull catalog over the decades since. As for the lyrics, I was always taken by the sense of desperation in the lines, “And the train, it won’t stop going, no way to slow down.” But I was surprised to learn only recently that Anderson was actually talking obliquely about the problem of overpopulation. As he put it in 2016: “‘Locomotive Breath’ was about the runaway train of population growth and capitalism, and on those sorts of unstoppable ideas. We’re on this crazy train, and we can’t get off of it. Where is it going? Will it ever slow down? When I was born in 1947, the population of the planet was slightly less than a third of what it is today, so it should be a sobering thought that in one man’s lifetime, our population has more than tripled. You’d think population growth would have brought prosperity, happiness, food and a reasonable spread of wealth, but quite the opposite has happened, and is happening even more to this day.”

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