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Friends Of Mine Lyrics
Friends of mine don't have the time
For food or wine
Just money is on their minds
Life is sweet
On a one-way street
They're indiscrete
And funny, they'll never meet
B-bay-b-bay-b-bay-b-bay-bay-baby...
I gotta get a two-ton truck
I gotta get a two-ton truck
I gotta get a two-ton truck
I gotta get a two-ton truck
I gotta do it to a duck on a two-ton truck and fade away like Ron Rene
All right, all right
You got the magical mystery tour
You got the magical mystery tour
You got the magical mystery tour
You got the magical mystery tour
And Kurt is the Walrus
And Kurt is the Walrus
And the Walrus does funny things to the veins in his left arm
All right
And Michael is now a father, all right
And Michael is now a proud father, all right
And my good friend Michael is now a proud father
And Michael is now a father, all right
And that means Michael's wife is a mother, all right
Up the 13 steps of the gallows walked the condemned man
And time passes very quickly when death is near
After having completed the first step, the condemned man knew there were but 12 left
Before he would meet death and his soul would leave his body
And after having completed the 13 steps the condemned man was met by a giant cloaked figure
And with a quick flick of the wrist the man was dead
And his soul left his body and went down down down
To a place we laughingly refer to as hell
But none of us will ever go there because we're all far too groovy
The man's body was left to rot on the gallows
And a great multitude of black birds came and picked the man's corpse apart
Piece by piece
Limb by limb
Until nothing remained
And his blood melted into the ground below
The gallows was made from a tree created by God
The man's blood dripped into the ground which was created by God
Even the giant cloaked figure which was the man's own end was created by God
Even the man's soul which went down was created by God
Even the black birds which picked the man's corpse apart were created by God
AND WHERE WAS GOD?
In Flanders Fields the poppies grow
between the crosses row on row
to mark the dead
To Flanders Fields the hippies go
to smoke the poppies there below
and feed their heads
And they're all friends of mine, each and every one of them, no better or no worse
And we'll probably end up down there together when it's all over
And that's why we say
b-bay-b-bay-b-bay-b-bay-b-baby ...
It's all over and it's all right.
For food or wine
Just money is on their minds
On a one-way street
They're indiscrete
And funny, they'll never meet
I gotta get a two-ton truck
I gotta get a two-ton truck
I gotta get a two-ton truck
I gotta do it to a duck on a two-ton truck and fade away like Ron Rene
All right, all right
You got the magical mystery tour
You got the magical mystery tour
You got the magical mystery tour
And Kurt is the Walrus
And the Walrus does funny things to the veins in his left arm
All right
And Michael is now a proud father, all right
And my good friend Michael is now a proud father
And Michael is now a father, all right
And that means Michael's wife is a mother, all right
And time passes very quickly when death is near
After having completed the first step, the condemned man knew there were but 12 left
Before he would meet death and his soul would leave his body
And after having completed the 13 steps the condemned man was met by a giant cloaked figure
And with a quick flick of the wrist the man was dead
And his soul left his body and went down down down
To a place we laughingly refer to as hell
But none of us will ever go there because we're all far too groovy
The man's body was left to rot on the gallows
And a great multitude of black birds came and picked the man's corpse apart
Piece by piece
Limb by limb
Until nothing remained
And his blood melted into the ground below
The man's blood dripped into the ground which was created by God
Even the giant cloaked figure which was the man's own end was created by God
Even the man's soul which went down was created by God
Even the black birds which picked the man's corpse apart were created by God
AND WHERE WAS GOD?
between the crosses row on row
to mark the dead
to smoke the poppies there below
and feed their heads
And we'll probably end up down there together when it's all over
b-bay-b-bay-b-bay-b-bay-b-baby ...
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every once in a while, burton cummings desperately wants to be jim morrison...
hey.... he does a pretty good job in his own right.... and that was all you got from this song? boo on you....
This song is absolutely amazing. Just amazing.
rofl, 3 posts...depressing...amazing (and trippy) song, y is it so unknown??
This song is completely my favorite Guess Who song, I expected more comments. But yeah, I'm thinking that song is about being on drugs, as how it references a walrus(?) doing funny things to the veins in his left arm, and also the poppies(opium). This is pretty much the best conclusion I could come to, but I think the real meaning of the song is, like a Doors song, multiple and interpretable.
"Kurt" is Kurt Winter, band member and co-writer of their songs.
"Kurt" is Kurt Winter, band member and co-writer of their songs.
Magical Mystery Tour is a Beatles album released a few years before Friends of Mine. "Kurt is the Walrus" refers to a song on that Beatles album, "I am the Walrus". At the time, there was a lot of speculation about who was in the walrus suit on the album cover (it's too complicated to detail here), but that fact was parodied in a later Beatles' dong, "Glass Onion", in which Lennon says "The Walrus was Paul".
Magical Mystery Tour is a Beatles album released a few years before Friends of Mine. "Kurt is the Walrus" refers to a song on that Beatles album, "I am the Walrus". At the time, there was a lot of speculation about who was in the walrus suit on the album cover (it's too complicated to detail here), but that fact was parodied in a later Beatles' dong, "Glass Onion", in which Lennon says "The Walrus was Paul".
Reference to poppies comes from a poem written by John McCrae after witnessing the death of his friend's death in WW I. I would like to know what the reference to "fade away like Ron Rene".
Ron Rene did fade away though, didn't he? Nobody knows who he is.
Ron Rene did fade away though, didn't he? Nobody knows who he is.
I think it has something to do with the fact that Ron Rene was a member of a Winnipeg group back in the '60s called the Quid - what the 'fade away' means I'm not sure - maybe he flopped out I dunno
I think it has something to do with the fact that Ron Rene was a member of a Winnipeg group back in the '60s called the Quid - what the 'fade away' means I'm not sure - maybe he flopped out I dunno
Whoa, I just looked up the Quid on the Wiki. Ron Rene died in 2007 of a heart attack. He flopped out the hard way, this time.
Whoa, I just looked up the Quid on the Wiki. Ron Rene died in 2007 of a heart attack. He flopped out the hard way, this time.
Rene and The Guess Who people and neil young all hung out at the same bar in Canada. It has a strange name I forget.
Rene and The Guess Who people and neil young all hung out at the same bar in Canada. It has a strange name I forget.
"Kurt" is Kurt Winter, band member and co-writer of their songs. Magical Mystery Tour is a Beatles album released a few years before Friends of Mine. "Kurt is the Walrus" refers to a song on that Beatles album, "I am the Walrus".
At the time, there was a lot of speculation about who was in the walrus suit on the album cover. I won't describe it here, but it was parodied in a later Beatles' song, "Glass Onion", in which Lennon says "The Walrus was Paul".
The Guess Who hung around with Niel Young before he became famous. Young looked up to Bachmann. They mainly hung around one bar that I forget the name of now. Young even played with them before they became big. Some of them used heroin, which Young swore off after a friend of his died of it. This is referenced in "Friends of Mine" and in Young's "The Needle And The Damage Done."
The original version of "Friends of Mine" is on their post-breakup compilation, This Time Long Ago. Cummings sings about "doing it with your mother" (turned into "do it with a duck") and smothering six month old babies. He was imitating Jim Morrision, BTW. RCA said no effing WAY, and they had to change it for Wheatfield Soul.
Of course here in The Future, the nee-groes sing about things like that all the time but nobody gives a damn because they're nee-groes.
The long raps about death and god in this song and "Hang on to your life" comes from Bachman's confusion about a branch of the jewish-islam-christian mythology which is obsessed with ridiculous bullshit like that. He resolved it, not by realizing that it is indeed ridiculous bullshit, but by converting to mormonism–the stupidest branch in the whole mythological tree except for islam.
In fact, that's why the Guess Who first began to break up; Bachmann kept pushing his dumb-ass religion onto the band and writing it into their lyrics.
Nevertheless, if you listen to the words as sounds, they sound really good, even important. And if you listen to the FEELINGS behind the words in Friends of Mine and Hang on to your Life instead of the literal meanings, the religious references are even poignant, because mythology deals with universal, deep human concerns like death.
BTW, the bizarre, counterproductive ways that so-called "humanity" deals with these concerns made me despair to the point of walking off my nuc engineering job and living naked in a cave. Yes really. tiny url dot com slash kanecave
-- faye kane homeless brain