heard several versions of it that you have kindly shared with me, but you’ve got the definitive one on this album.
I’ve done it a couple different ways. It never has been released, by the way, and that’s why I wanted to get it out there to the people. What I did, on this particular time, was sit down out with David at the control board and had my amp sitting in the kitchen miked and the door shut between us with my electric lit- tle Epiphone guitar and we just went it through once and said, “let me do it again”- and I played it four times in a row, with dif- ferent feelings. I didn’t re-do it because of any particular mistakes - I just did it to see what would happen. I think the one you hear is probably the second time around out of the three or four.
Nifty.
But it’s a song to Robert Johnson, now that you mentioned him - kind of his story, poi- soned by a jealous husband. He really wasn’t killed by the poison, but was weakened. When he was weakened he caught pneumo- nia and back then, when you got pneumonia, you pretty much bit the dust.
Six feet in the ground...
Yeah - so that’s where the line comes from, “You’re way beyond the Mississippi line.”
Exactly. I think that’s a really brilliant song. I also wanted to ask you about “If Your Attitude is Funky... Nobody wants yo’ monkey.”
(Laughs)You’ve been know for songs like “My Baby Don’t Shave (and She Likes to Misbehave.)” and now this one. so could you explain to everybody what inspired you to write about funky attitudes and monkeys? Well...
And we know we’re not talking about the little monkey in the zoo, but... Well, this song just kind of came up - the line that first inspired me to write this song was when I was sitting down many, many years ago. In the song “Time Will Take Us,” there are lines in that song that were not used. They sat in a file or in my head or in my drawers for sometimes six or seven years before they‘re used, and then the right moment, the right place, the right time comes up - you know how it is - kind of like a crossword puzzle. You just go “wow - this will fit in just fine - been waiting for this for six or seven years.” Anyway, the line in “Your Attitude is Funky” - “I bet there’s somebody that’s glad you’re gone.” I was sitting in a lit- tle pub in Gulf Shores, Alabama, I remember like it was yesterday. It was a place called the End Zone, owned by a guy named Kenny Stabler. He had this little bar, and I used to live very close to there. Scott (Boyer) and me and Topper Priced used to go down there and play some music every once in a while. But we were in there one day and a good looking woman walked in. Guy sitting next to me leaned over to his buddy and said, “Man, did you see her? She’s beautiful!” The guy says, “Yeah, she’s beautiful, but I guarantee you, somebody somewhere is glad she’s gone.” So I thought that was pretty clever. And it can work the other way around, of course. But that’s one of my comic relief things tunes.
Well you need that, you write some of these really emotional love songs that - you know what a big guy I am. I’ll be sitting there weeping uncontrollably over some of these songs and, all of a sudden you get the “Monkey song,”,\ as I call it, and you start laughing. It’s kind of the same way I’m affected by another friend of mine named Paul Thorn. His songs can get me all emo-
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