Friday, July 11, 2008

Drippin' with Cheeze

I'm taking a break from the Beanbag Chronicles to bring you a special edition of:

Drippin' with Cheeze

I give a big thanks to my big sis "Neetzy" over at Negative Space because I have never heard of this song before. (You gotta get some of your paintings up there Sis!)

What happens if you get trapped in a coal mine with your friends and you start to run out of food and water?

I guess our basic instinct to survive kicks in and "you do what you gotta do" ya know?!

The song was writing by Rupert Holmes - you know - Mr. Pina Colada guy, and when I looked up the info about this on Song Facts he has this to say about how the song came about:

Holmes: "At the time, I was working on an arrangement of '16 Tons,' the Tennessee Ernie Ford hit from the '50s, for an artist named Andy Kim. While I was working on the arrangement, there was a cooking show on the TV in the kitchen. It was called The Galloping Gourmet with Graham Kerr. It's on in the background and I'm singing the lyrics to '16 Tons,' playing it to a kind of vamp sort of like 'Proud Mary,' and I sing 'Some people say a man is made out of mud, a coal man's made out of muscle and blood. Muscle and blood and skin and bones, a mind that's weak and a back that's...' and I think, you know, that almost sounds like a recipe - muscle and blood and skin and bones, bake in a moderate oven for 2 hours, top with Miracle Whip. I had seen the movie Suddenly Last Summer about a week earlier on TV, and it had a revelation about cannibalism in it, and I thought, If it's good enough for Tennessee Williams, it's good enough for The Buoys. So I thought, Cannibalism during a mining disaster, that'll get banned. It's not like I'm really telling people to go out and eat someone, this is just this dark, horrible thing that happened in this story. So I write this lyric: 'Timothy, Timothy, where on Earth did you go?' It's about three boys who are trapped in a mine with water but no food for maybe a week. When they're pulled free, they don't remember what happened, but they know they're not hungry. One of them is missing, and that's Timothy. We record this on the weekend and I don't think about it again."

I don't think I can add anymore to this story...so here you go!

Bon apetite!




Timothy
Written by Rupert Holmes
Sung by: The Bouys


Trapped in a mine that had caved in
And everyone knows the only ones left
Were Joe and me and Tim
When they broke through to pull us free
The only ones left to tell the tale
Were Joe and me

Timothy, Timothy, where on earth did you go?
Timothy, Timothy, God why don't I know?

Hungry as hell no food to eat
And Joe said that he would sell his soul
For just a piece of meat
Water enough to drink for two
And Joe said to me, "I'll have a swig
And then there's some for you."

Timothy, Timothy, Joe was looking at you
Timothy, Timothy, God what did we do?

I must have blacked out just around then
'Cause the very next thing that I could see
Was the light of the day again
My stomach was full as it could be
And nobody ever got around
To finding Timothy
Timothy...

4 comments:

Kari Hultman said...

Thanks a lot! Think I'll skip dinner tonight....

dive said...

Oh, hee hee hee, Shazza!
Holy moley that's funny!
The video is pure genius, especially the bit at the end (you know what I'm talking about).
Thank you for making me laugh 'til I ache.

Fireblossom said...

I remember that song. It's stored in some overflow brain cell right between "Poke Salad Annie" and "Gimme Dat Ding." It's a wonder I can function at all.

neetzy said...

I remember hearing it in Mom's kitchen, thinking, "Did he really eat his friend?" The song haunts me. It comes back to me when I'm in Mom's kitchen. Weird huh?