Sitting on a park bench
Eying little girls with bad intent
Snots running down his nose
Greasy fingers smearing shabby clothes, hey, Aqualung
Drying in the cold sun
Watching as the frilly panties run, hey, Aqualung
Feeling like a dead duck
Spitting out pieces of his broken luck, oh, Aqualung
Sun streaking cold, an old man wandering lonely
Taking time, the only way he knows
Leg hurting bad as he bends to pick a dog end
He goes down to a bog and warms his feet
Feeling alone, the army's up the road
Salvation a la mode and a cup of tea
Aqualung, my friend, don't you start away uneasy
You poor old sod, you see it's only me
Do you still remember
December's foggy freeze
When the ice that clings on to your beard
It was screaming agony
Hey and you snatch your rattling last breaths
With deep-sea diver sounds
And the flowers bloom like
Madness in the spring
Sun streaking cold, an old man wandering lonely
Taking time, the only way he knows
Leg hurting bad as he bends to pick a dog end
He goes down to a bog and warms his feet
Feeling alone, the army's up the road
Salvation a la mode and a cup of tea
Aqualung my friend don't you start away uneasy
You poor old sod, you see it's only me
Aqualung my friend don't you start away uneasy
You poor old sod, you see it's only me
Sitting on a park bench
Eying up little girls with bad intent
Snots running down his nose
Greasy fingers smearing shabby clothes, hey Aqualung
Drying in the cold sun
Watching as the frilly panties run, hey Aqualung
Feeling like a dead duck
Spitting out pieces of his broken luck, hey Aqualung
Oh Aqualung
Eying little girls with bad intent
Snots running down his nose
Greasy fingers smearing shabby clothes, hey, Aqualung
Drying in the cold sun
Watching as the frilly panties run, hey, Aqualung
Feeling like a dead duck
Spitting out pieces of his broken luck, oh, Aqualung
Sun streaking cold, an old man wandering lonely
Taking time, the only way he knows
Leg hurting bad as he bends to pick a dog end
He goes down to a bog and warms his feet
Feeling alone, the army's up the road
Salvation a la mode and a cup of tea
Aqualung, my friend, don't you start away uneasy
You poor old sod, you see it's only me
Do you still remember
December's foggy freeze
When the ice that clings on to your beard
It was screaming agony
Hey and you snatch your rattling last breaths
With deep-sea diver sounds
And the flowers bloom like
Madness in the spring
Sun streaking cold, an old man wandering lonely
Taking time, the only way he knows
Leg hurting bad as he bends to pick a dog end
He goes down to a bog and warms his feet
Feeling alone, the army's up the road
Salvation a la mode and a cup of tea
Aqualung my friend don't you start away uneasy
You poor old sod, you see it's only me
Aqualung my friend don't you start away uneasy
You poor old sod, you see it's only me
Sitting on a park bench
Eying up little girls with bad intent
Snots running down his nose
Greasy fingers smearing shabby clothes, hey Aqualung
Drying in the cold sun
Watching as the frilly panties run, hey Aqualung
Feeling like a dead duck
Spitting out pieces of his broken luck, hey Aqualung
Oh Aqualung
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"Screaming agony.
And you snatch your rattling last breaths
With deep-sea diver sounds,
And the flowers bloom like
Madness in the spring."
To me, this sounds exactly like a deep sea diver who had something serious go wrong with his dive and had divers bends. The symptoms - agonizing bends and visual hallucination is exactly what happens. And Divers Bends or the Cassion Disease is incurable. Once you have it, you live the rest of your life out in agony.
In fact, this is one of the first songs of Tull that I heard and to me the imagery of a deep sea diver who's career was ended abruptly by divers bends was very very strong - it came out both in the lyrics and the title.
1 In the beginning Man created God;
and in the image of Man
created he him.
2 And Man gave unto God a multitude of
names,that he might be Lord of all
the earth when it was suited to Man
3 And on the seven millionth
day Man rested and did lean
heavily on his God and saw that
it was good.
4 And Man formed Aqualung of
the dust of the ground, and a
host of others likened unto his kind.
5 And these lesser men were cast into the
void; And some were burned, and some were
put apart from their kind.
6 And Man became the God that he had
created and with his miracles did
rule over all the earth.
7 But as all these things
came to pass, the Spirit that did
cause man to create his God
lived on within all men: even
within Aqualung.
8 And man saw it not.
9 But for Christ's sake he'd
better start looking.
I just had a flash on something, and came here to make a comment... and find that you've come pretty close to what I had to say.
I'll add this tweak: Yes, Aqualung is a misunderstood homeless person; suspect and untrusted, but ultimately harmless (as per pieguy3).
But I think Anderson raises him to the realm high metaphor. And the metaphor is this: In a world ruled by religious jackasses, those who choose to hew toward reason and free inquiry are held suspect. There's an old syllogism--sort of on the wane these days, but you can still find it around--that would have us believe that the irreligious can't be trusted, as they lack the "fear of God" that controls men's appetites and makes them "fit" for civil society.
Aqualung, besides being a homeless guy, is also a mocking representation of these unaffiliated reprobates. And in the end, the voice saying, "Ya poor ol' sod/You see it's only/Me" is the voice of quiet, calm, even arguably compassionate, Reason.
One thing that fascinates me about Anderson in this period is how he managed to have stumbled upon a narrow window in pop culture, in which he was able to slip through a product that downright assaults pop culture's number one cardinal rule: Plan to unstintingly flatter the common man's conceits that his true glory is his capacity to *feel*, ... or there's the door.
Anderson, here in Aqualung and later in "Thick as a Brick", attacks the very idea. In a society apparently seriously strewn with religious miniature Mussolinis, he pushed the idea that people *can* and in fact *need to* _think_ their way out of our collective paper bag.
Feeling alone - the army's up the road
salvation à la mode, and a cup of tea.
This part refers to the Salvation Army handing out free food to people, like the bum in this song.
And you snatch your rattling last breaths with deep-sea-diver sounds,
and the flowers bloom like madness in the spring.
This refers to the bum dying. The flowers bloom like madness in the spring refers to life going on as if nothing happened after the bums death.
A great song. The best song I've ever heard about a bum:)
Homeless people are typically exposed to the elements, disheveled, dirty, smelly, and often visibly ill and/or lame, sometimes using mobility props or wheelchair-bound, covered in degenerative diabetic wounds or contagious/infectious/insect sores etc. from medical neglect.
The depiction of Aqualung in the song is brutally accurate and has nothing to do with appealing to thrill-seeking teens. Anderson wrote raw lyrics that strike deep into the soul with penetrating honesty, and his target audience for marvelously broad-minded baroque-loving classical jazz rock folk fusion synthesis is artistic intellectuals like himself that bore easily and want to suck the marrow of life to become one with the universe while revealing all of its dirty secrets to/about everyone regardless if they understand or appreciate his efforts to mix it all up and paint it on like plaster.
Anderson was capturing the sense of disgust at the sight of homeless people that is triggered in right-wing germophobic OCD people of means who lack empathy. It snot about marketing albums to kids lol but it could have that effect in thrill-seeking kids who aren’t educated or sophisticated enough to appreciate the deeper meaning. For example, when I first heard this song and eventually bought the album as a teen, I had zero experience with homeless people, and I had to muster some imaginative effort to relate and understand the lyrics. It wasn’t vulgar fascination but it wasn’t penetrating insight that I exhibited either. I had just about zero experience with popular rock music and even less with intellectual poetic fusion that was making the rounds. My fascination was with the rawness and complexity of it, not the disgust it evoked.