Tom Waits
Keith Richards...
He can run faster than a fax machine
His urine is blue
He smells like a campfire
He was once slapped by the Queen
He has walked the equivalent of three times
Around the Earth
Like Keith, the Phengaris rebeli caterpillar strums
His bottom like a guitar and the chord attracts females
At one concert in Java in the '70's
Men screamed, women fainted, and a small boy
Broke his arm in the chaos
And it rained thousands of black worms the size of
Honeybees
He wrote his share of the songs from Sticky Fingers
In a henhouse in Malta
He once won the Hope Diamond in a poker game
And in the same night lost it in a game of craps
He owns a lug wrench and a tire jack made of solid gold
He was born in a cloak room and had always been prone
To fits of weeping followed by hysterical laughter
One of his first jobs was cleaning out the lion cage
At the London Zoo
Like the praying mantis he has only one ear and
It is located between his legs
He can hold a note up to 6 minutes and has 7 or 8 notes
More than the ordinary voice
And they are equally sonorous and clear
Hands like a woodworker
Arms like a swabby
A back like a soldier
A mind like a detective
Shoulders like a boxer
A voice like a choir boy
And a country western face
His tunings are furiously guarded secrets
He claims one open tuning he utilizes was inspired
While waiting for a train in Detroit
In a vacant lot, the remains of a barbed wire fence
Were half circling the remains of an old foundry
And there, amidst tin cans, old mattresses and dolls' heads
It occurred to Keith that a guitar is
-------At its most rudimentary level-------
Wire that has been stretched across wood that when
Strummed produces a pleasant relationship between
Disparate components
Noticing the wire fence in effect contained these same
Ingredients, Keith took the lid of a discarded paint can and
Strummed the tightly stretched fence wires
Violently, rhythmically, and repeatedly
Thus satisfying hhis curiosity and releasing the peculiar
Voicings of the chord we all know to be the chord
At the beginning of Jumpin' Jack Flash
Transcribing the notes and adapting them for guitar,
Keith lost none of the angular chord's mystifying and
Natural jaggedness and thus, the "fence chord" was born
Keith once took *my* 10,000 dollar overcoat
To put down across a mud puddle
To allow an octogenarian laundress
Named Clementine Moorehouse to cross the street
Comfortably
That's Keith always the gentleman