Coffee and Cigarettes

It was getting near time to meet up with Iggy Jim down at the old Paradise restaurant. I had been busy all morning collecting cold wet coins from milk bottles down on tobacco road after a long night of trying to sleep on the heated air grates around the VG hospital so the warmth of my usual hangout for a few hours would be blessed relief. I'd be a bit late but I figured Iggy Jim would be cool and that he'd understand if I told him how busy a medical morning it had been.

Back at diggers dive later that night Johnny Mac and I were talking about our favorite records of the moment and he said he thought that Ain't Nobody's Business But My Own by Taj Mahal had really captured the liberating essence of the times in which we lived.

That was true enough and I dug that song myself, but I said I thought that Edgar Winter's version of J. D. Loudermilk's Tobacco Road was more poignant and more graphically descriptive of the reality of our dirt poor lives no matter how crazy champagne or cocaine made us.

Johnny Mac said he couldn't argue with that as indeed he also identified very personally with Tobacco Road.

Since we were discussing this in a diggers dive, I decided to search around until I found that record which surely had to be somewhere in the recovery room upstairs from the shooting gallery. It was bound to be in that rambling stack. Sure enough, Max the junkie had it stashed underneath his harpoon gun…now was it track 5 or 6..?

Just copped this new needle...man, talk about blessed relief...

So was it track 5 or track 6...? I can't remember...doesn't matter… actually just reminds me of 25 or 6 to 4 by Chicago Transit Authority and our days and nights in Amsterdam in 1969. I've never actually been to Amsterdam but I've been to 1969...pretty much the same thing...William Burroughs was "Rat Tat Tat Katalli" [with a gun] and beauty was a blond sheathed, lace draped waif in deer skin boots with a bounty on her potions and a seventeen year old vision to sell.

And we were buyin' it all in quantity.

Waiting for the break of day
Searching for something to say
Flashing lights against the sky
Giving up I close my eyes
Sitting cross-legged on the floor
25 or 6 to 4

Staring blindly into space
Getting up to splash my face
Wanting just to stay awake
Wondering how much I can take
Should I try to do some more
25 or 6 to 4

Feeling like I ought to sleep
Spinning room is sinking deep
Searching for something to say
Waiting for the break of day
25 or 6 to 4
25 or 6 to 4