For Robert Plant on My 66th Birthday
by Mike Finley
It helps to have a big bottom, the drums and bass, I mean.
With that beat, you forget about making sense, you just go.
And your lyrics only need to be fairy tales and dick promises.
I was always too good to stoop to that.
In my mind my lines went deeper and more thoughtful --
about love and loss and wondering and such.
At least I thought so. I hoped so. But it didn’t work out for me.
I estimate Plant has made $100+ million from his art over 50 years,
and I have made maybe $1500 total -- no comparison, really.
This may seem like not the greatest injustice ever perpetrated,
but tonight it is the one I am focusing on.
He’s just some white English guy, who really has no right to the blues --
and let me concede that I don’t, either.
But I am sympathetic to them.
Plant is the kind of guy who gets sued for stealing the blues.
And he pays up and goes on stealing.
How I hate him.
Well, not hate exactly -- but come on, the man is truly awful, with his tight pants and the cucumber tucked inside.
He is very comfortable touching himself in public, whereas I --
perhaps striving to seem professional, or well brought up –
I always pull back from that.
He knows he’s morally hideous and he just doesn’t care,
he keeps going in once a week for his curly permanent, plus that dope and all those BJs ,
they haven’t made his hair fall out, and that seems wrong to me.
Like I say, I pull back, that kind of exhibitionism doesn’t work as well with audiences of ten or eleven.
But just now I will be honest and say, 50 years late in the game,
That I too wanted to be a disgrace,
I too wanted to be loved, like him, scorchingly, druggedly, luridly.
Lou Reed-ly
I was always held back by my shame --
I was always held back by my shame.
With that beat, you forget about making sense, you just go.
And your lyrics only need to be fairy tales and dick promises.
I was always too good to stoop to that.
In my mind my lines went deeper and more thoughtful --
about love and loss and wondering and such.
At least I thought so. I hoped so. But it didn’t work out for me.
I estimate Plant has made $100+ million from his art over 50 years,
and I have made maybe $1500 total -- no comparison, really.
This may seem like not the greatest injustice ever perpetrated,
but tonight it is the one I am focusing on.
He’s just some white English guy, who really has no right to the blues --
and let me concede that I don’t, either.
But I am sympathetic to them.
Plant is the kind of guy who gets sued for stealing the blues.
And he pays up and goes on stealing.
How I hate him.
Well, not hate exactly -- but come on, the man is truly awful, with his tight pants and the cucumber tucked inside.
He is very comfortable touching himself in public, whereas I --
perhaps striving to seem professional, or well brought up –
I always pull back from that.
He knows he’s morally hideous and he just doesn’t care,
he keeps going in once a week for his curly permanent, plus that dope and all those BJs ,
they haven’t made his hair fall out, and that seems wrong to me.
Like I say, I pull back, that kind of exhibitionism doesn’t work as well with audiences of ten or eleven.
But just now I will be honest and say, 50 years late in the game,
That I too wanted to be a disgrace,
I too wanted to be loved, like him, scorchingly, druggedly, luridly.
Lou Reed-ly
I was always held back by my shame --
I was always held back by my shame.