Ten songs that might make you want to call an insurance company and sue your employer...
(By the way, if you do the online marketing for an insurance company and you're thinking about leaving a link in my comments... please don't. I'll only delete it. See if you can insure yourselves against that.)
Been a while since I featured a country-heavy Top Ten here, but nobody loves a good workplace accident like your average country singer...
When Daddy's a long distance lorry driver, you wait every night for his call. But what happens when it's the police making that call...?
Well it's Wednesday evening, momma's waitin' by the phone It rings but it's not his voice Seems the highway patrol has found a jack-knifed rig In a snow bank in Illinois But the driver was missin' and the search had been abandoned For the weather had everything stalled And they had checked all the houses and the local motels When they had some more news they'd call And she told them when they found him to tell him that she loved him And she hung up the phone singin'... Roll on highway, roll on along Roll on daddy till you get back home...
Extra points if anyone can find any other songs which actually contain the phrase "workplace accident"...
As the moon rose in the window Rufus began his tale About an oil rig near the gulf coast Puttin' man against metal In a classic work-place accident He told how the drill commenced to shakin' The platform started to rock The chain began breaking They were straight out of luck And then the sky kinda lite up Just like a lightnin' bolt had struck
What happens when God doesn't get his birthday cards on time...
I got yer package; it was all a mess Lightning strikes the postman in his chest I hope that you remember the things you had to say It's just a supernatural delay
I could probably do a Top Ten Train Crash Songs... there's certainly plenty of runaway locomotives in my collection. Pity the unlucky engine driver...
And then a telegram come from Washington station,
This is how it read:
"Oh that brave engineer that run ol 97,
"Is lyin in old Danville dead."
'Cos he was going down a grade making 90 miles an hour,
The whistle broke into a scream.
He was found in the wreck with his hand on the throttle,
Scalded to death by the steam.
Warning lights are flashing down at Quality Control Somebody threw a spanner and they threw him in the hole There's rumors in the loading bay and anger in the town Somebody blew the whistle and the walls came down There's a meeting in the boardroom they're trying to trace the smell There's leaking in the washroom there's a sneak in personnel Somewhere in the corridors someone was heard to sneeze Goodness me, could this be Industrial Disease?
Here's Johnny again... along with Kris, Waylon and Willie. Both the sailor and the dam-builder meet potentially litigious ends here... I'm not sure the highwayman or the star ship captain have much of a case.
This week, ten songs for Little Johns everywhere. Special mention to The Tallest Man On Earth, and Long Tall Sally, who had her moment in My Top Ten Sally Songs.
Liz Phair can indeed be a complicated communicator, but she couldn't possibly be any more scary even if she was a Big Tall Man. I like the talky style of this one.
I was very much into Ben Lee around the time he released this, as part of his third album, Breathing Tornados, back in 1998. Not heard a lot from him since, although he's still at it, by all accounts.
Right, the chemistry is right This boy has reached his height This feeling just goes on and on, and on and on From strength to strength I'm ten feet long
Andy lets Colin do the heavy lifting on this one, released as a single in the USA because it was as close as XTC got to a "West Coast" vibe.
Growing up in Hicksville, New York, and being a bit of a short-arse as a teenager led Billy Joel to take up boxing to defend himself. He became quite successful on the amateur circuit until his nose was broken and he decided to concentrate on his piano playing instead. He became a bigger man that way...
And so in my small way I'm a big man on Mulberry street I don't mean all day Only at night when I'm light on my feet
I was a huge Joel fan as a teenager (imagine how cool that made me!) and I also loved the TV show Moonlighting. So I was like a pig in clover when the two came together...
Six foot six He stood on the ground He weighed 235 pounds But I saw that giant of a man brought down by A thing called love
This is a song I remember Radio 2 playing when I was a kid but despite it being a biggish hit on both sides of the Atlantic, it doesn't often feature on Greatest Hit collections, so I had to hunt down the album of the same name - released in 1972, the year of my birth - to get it in my collection. A good move this, because the rest of the album is pretty cool too.
A Thing Called Love was written by Jerry Reed Hubbard who also gave Elvis Guitar Man and recorded the theme to Smokey & The Bandit... in which he appeared as Cledus Snow.
This early Human League single (from 1979, folks!) apparently deals with Phil Oakey's boundless ambition to become a pop superstar. Arguably, while the Human League would record far better pop songs (realising Oakey's ambition), they would sacrifice a little of the quirkiness and fun heard on this early track in the process.
With concentration My size increased And now I'm fourteen stories high At least!! Empire state human Just a bored kid I'll go to Egypt to be A pyramid...
Based on one of Jim Croce's old army "buddies", this song deals with a guy who's always on the lookout for trouble.
All the downtown ladies called him 'Treetop Lover' All the men just called him 'Sir'
But
no matter how big you are, or how bad you are (even if you're "meaner
than a junkyard dog"), there's always someone bigger and badder... and
by the end of the song, Leroy looks "like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple
of pieces gone".
Bad, Bad Leroy Brown was a US Number
One - Croce's last before his tragic death in a plane crash in 1973. The
song would later be covered by Frank Sinatra, as well as inspiring
Freddie Mercury to write Queen's Bring Back That Leroy Brown and Loretta Lynn to pen Mrs. Leroy Brown. There's even a couple of wrestlers who took their name from this song: Bad Leroy Brown & Junkyard Dog.
1. Jimmy Dean - Big Bad John
I've loved this song since I was a kid when Terry Wogan used to play it. This legendary giant, who was "six foot six and weighed two forty five" (ten pounds heavier than Cash's big bloke) was the strong silent type at the mine where he worked, although "everybody knew you didn't give no lip to Big John". Then one day a timber cracked and all the miners thought "they'd breathed their last... 'cept John". Some say the heroic measures he took to hold up those joists till all his fellow miners escaped were modelled on the Ancient Greek tale of Polydamas of Skotoussa, though something tells me that might be crediting Jimmy Dean with a little too much classical learnin'.
I learnt a couple of surprising things about Big Bad John while researching this post. First, about Jimmy Dean himself, who I always pictured as a big, bad-ass Johnny Cash type. Not so...
Apparently, he's most famous in the U.S. for his sausage: Jimmy Dean Sausages, a successful brand he founded in the late 50s.
But most surprising of all were the sequels. Firstly The Cajun Queen, in which Big John's ex-girlfriend arrives in town, finds his body, and resurrects him with the kiss of life. Like all bad sequels which destroy the integrity of the original movie, we can choose to pretend it never happened...
Except, then comes the third installment, Little Bitty Big John, in which John's son discovers what his father got up to down that mine.
And if that wasn't enough, there's My Big John by Dottie West, told from the perspective of John's Cajun Queen... wisely ignoring both previous sequels.
