Tearing that hotel down, contextually
The Grand Funk Railroad (on Naboo, Grand Moff Railroad) song "We're an American Band" has once again fallen under the white-hot laser focus of critical scrutiny.The song details the band's exploits on the road, particularly in hotels in Little Rock and Omaha.
"These fine ladies," GFR drummer Don Brewer sings, "They had a plan. They was out to meet the boys in the band."
Two vocal camps have different interpretations of the following line, describing revels after a performance.
"Feelin' good, feelin' right; it's Saturday night. The hotel detective - he was outta sight!"
Theory One is that the hotel detective was "outta sight", meaning good, exceeding expectations, or of particular usefulness to the band. Adherents believe that the hotel detective might have chosen to look the other way while debauchery ensued in the Railroad's lodgings, perhaps because of a bribe of money, substances, groupie services, or a promise to thank him on later albums.
Theory Two is that the hotel detective was literally nowhere to be found, thus "out of sight."
Some conflict-avoidant scholars argue that the results would be the same either way. Whether the hotel detective was complicit in the shenanigans or was physically absent is meaningless since drummer Brewer, guitarist Mark Farmer, bassist Mel Schacher, and keyboard player Craig Frost all got to join in on the hotel tearing-down proceedings.
Proponents of the first theory contend that if the detective were actually not visible then the band could have substituted the line "The hotel dick was nowhere in sight", a line that would have scanned nicely.
Theory Two fans say that listeners might naturally wonder where the hotel detective was during the rendezvous with the "chiquitas from Omaha" and that the line explains he was gone.
Brewer himself is no help, but he does explain the line about Freddie King ("I've got to tell you, poker's his thing"):
"Freddie King was the opening act for us, the great Blues guitar player from Texas. It always struck me as funny that he would make his band play poker with him every night. We used to sit in on some of the poker games, and that's where that line came from. His band, he'd pay them, and then he'd go win all the money back so they were broke and they'd have to keep playing for him - it was a great deal. A lot of people don't understand the Freddie King part because they don't know who Freddie King is. Anybody who knows about Freddie King immediately picks it up. People who don't say, 'What are you saying, that Focus can't sing?'"One thing that can't be argued is "American Band"'s rightful place, along with Mountain's "Mississippi Queen", in the Cowbell Pantheon.
See also: Grand Funk Railroad, Photo courtesy Messy Optics
Labels: pop
posted
by Marty Barrett at Sunday, February 25, 2007
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home