work aesthetic #1

"Course I make a little money
Haulin' coal by the ton
But when Saturday rolls around
I'm too tired for havin' fun"

Man, I used to love this song

My memory of it sounds better than the actuality of it now (which is still pretty fabulous)

The radio memory - the 'pick axe' snap of the drum cutting right through the sound  - the whole track sounded so odd, so minimal -  clanking mechanistic blues, the grind of regimented labor rendered as joyous celebration.

The flipside of "work" as dance music / club culture buzzword - in this case, for once, literally referring to labour... the travails of being a fleshly "appendage attached to the machine".

You can see why Devo wanted to do it

Although they did a pretty dreary job with it really - or perhaps simply redundant, they couldn't make it anymore rigid or machinic



Bought that Charley collection of Lee Dorsey tunes with the Joe Strummer liner note (literally a note - hand scrawled!) perhaps a year or two after it first came out

Great stuff, but nothing quite as odd and emaciated as "Working in the Coal Mine"

I  think this was my next favorite (what with Funk being my new religion in that 1980-81-82 period)



Actually probably the next fave was really "Ride Your Pony" -  pumping, so tight.




(Backing band = The Meters - a word with a technological undertone as well as its musical connotation)

Back to "Coal Mine"...

"Lord I'm so tired
How long can this go on?"

Apparently neither Dorsey nor producer-writer Allen Toussaint had ever been in a coal mine

But Dorsey knew about hard 'n' dirty work and the man-machine interface, what with running his own auto repair shop. A job he went back to during the dry spells between hits.

"He was a body and fender man when he wasn’t singing and even at his peak, when he would come off the road at the end of a successful tour, he would go and get into his grease clothes, his dirty work gear and go and work on cars. Straightening out fenders and painting bodywork" - Toussaint.