I can’t believe I gotta sit through this.
Boss says go I go. Says this fathead’s playin’ way past payin’ now. He ain’t got no use exceptin’ what he can learn to the others. He shoulda knowed that eventually you gotta pay the band.
Oh, he’s gonna wail until I shut him up. Sidle up next to him in the alley and take his elbow like we’s on a date, only I leaves fingerprints in him right off so he knows what’s what. All the way in the car he’s gonna walk Spanish and tell the side of my head that he’s got the lettuce stashed and all I gotta do is let him go get it. He knows I’m hard-boiled but he thinks we’re still talkin’. Talkin’s over, you lizard. I got sent ’cause I got no conversation in me.
He’s such a swell with the broads when he’s gamblin’ with other people’s dough and drinking champagne and wine. He’s gonna look a lot different under the lights I’m gonna show him. Man’s gotta learn. He ain’t gonna like it but he should get down on his knees and thank me because I’m sent from heaven and I make you repent first so you can meet your maker baptised. Who else is gonna give a man a chance like that?
5 Responses
Nice voice. More from this character, please. I'd bet my last simolean it started with a dame…
Naaaaah. It was money. Gambling, or just having a good time.
That's a nice, dry, light-toned tenor sax phrase Tony plays at the beginning & a good example of the Lester Young-derived tenor sound concept popular then but not heard much these days.
Tony's slinging a "New Wonder" model tenor sax made by the C.G. Conn Band Instrument Company of Elkhart, Indiana. Lester played one of those, too!!
And his mouthpiece is a "Tonalin" model by mouthpiece maker Arnold Brilhart. They're easy to pick out from the white color & black toothplate; they were very popular then – several other reedmen in the band are playing one, too. And again, Lester Young used one in the 50's.
So sayeth a saxophone equipment geek.
"the lettuce stashed"
"sidle up to him in the alley"
If I weren't old, I'd have to google those terms.
🙂
I agree that his problems all started with a dame.
His dad died before his kid brother was born. The Father always said it was proof that there is Life after Death. What he learned, was that this little man is what kept his mom and he thinking like a family.
So, when the guys did to his little brother, what they'd done to his old man, he discovered himself an orphan; his mom still lives, but her mind found itself got stuck.
It wasn't a dame. It was never a dame.
.