Draggin' the Line

How old are you? Were you there? Nobody snorted coke! A few isolated junkies mixed it with heroin, some smoked opium. It just wasn’t around! LSD was mistly in blotter form , mushrooms and weed was the norm. And there sure as shit was no crystal.

This song is great, one of the best pop songs of all time...but it was credited to Tommy James solo, not TJ & the Shondells. Should be moved to that entry...

Well, it does sound pretty hippie-ish, but I don't think it's about using drugs. Back in the day--let's just say WAY back in the day--"dragging the line" was an idiom for slogging through your daily life.

I think the song is about the virtues of living a simple life. Making a living the old, hard way (i.e., working with his hands rather than sitting at a desk), taking life as it comes, not being too busy or caught up with getting rich to stop and enjoy the simple things (we ain't got much but what we got's ours; hugging trees; peace of mine), with a minimum of encumbrances (only his dog for companionship).

As far as Sam eating purple flowers, I always got this picture of the songwriter going, "What can we rhyme with 'We ain't got much but what we got's ours'?" and the answers getting sillier and sillier till someone just said, "What the hell, let's put in the dog eating flowers," while everyone just totally cracked up. I think that line is a throwaway and not pivotal to the song at all. It is pretty funny though.

what law4 said, with the little addition that 'draggin' the line' is old time slang for driving a plow and later, for doing hard work to make ends meet.

As almost all Tommy James songs this one was about drugs. About draggin a line of coke to get through the workday after partying all night the night before. Of course "Snow" meant coke, "rain" meant Ludes AKA Quaalude's, and "Sunshine" was an Acid AKA LDS. And the line "My dog Sam eats purple flowers" was referring the to his "friend that doesn't do the same drug as him"! (That was what "Dog" meant then and "Cat" was someone who did the same drug as you!) "Sam" ate liquid LSD "Purple flowers" that was comon to put in grape Koolaid! So "Ain't got much, but what we've got's ours"meant that "we don't need to share our coke! Scotty