'Taking Notes and Stealing Quotes':

Drunk Again

This rumbustious song was the first number written by Brooker and Reid for the Exotic Birds and Fruit album, on which, of course, it did not eventually appear: since it was illustrated by Spencer Zahn in the style of the Grand Hotel booklet-drawings (see left), we may surmise that the text existed as early as the time of that album. It is said that the song was elbowed out of Exotic Birds by a last-minute creation, New Lamps for Old. It does bear a musical relationship to several songs on the album, however: to The Idol, in terms of its protracted soloing; to Monsieur R Monde in its flat-out pace; and to Butterfly Boys in its mature elaboration of some pretty ordinary rock components. Arguably it's the least melodic of all the contenders, but it is nonetheless an energetic and exciting track in which we can clearly hear five musicians (six, if you include the doppelganger acoustic guitar) thoroughly enjoying themselves.

Lyrically the song is sparsely intriguing: curiously some of the words are not reproduced on the CD booklet. It seems to deal with the haverings of an alcoholic, knowing he should jettison his habit, yet unable to summon the will to do so (some have wondered if it is to be read as a drunkard's dream, since the DTs are an established topic in country-ish music). It belongs in the Grand Hotel camp, as a number about excess of appetite, rather than in the world of Exotic Birds (which even contains a song (ostensibly) about Sensible Eating!) Musically, it depends upon two contrasting ideas – the belting rocky chords, riding on Cartwright's nifty bass riff, and the more static, bluesy climbing passage – and the dialogue between these two elements does something to dramatise the narrator's dilemma; its slightly shambolic sound, like Mabel and Good Captain Clack, perhaps suggests an ambience in which drinking, rather than abstinence, is the norm.

Set in the piano-boogie key of C, the song nevertheless starts with some crunching guitar: this same rhythmic motif was heard in live versions of Typewriter Torment later on. The verse is built on the highly characteristic Brooker dominant-dodging sequence of C, Bb, F and C (a relationship underlying numbers such as Long Gone Geek, Without a Doubt and The Piper's Tune): when this shifts up on to F and F sharp diminished (shades of Lime Street Blues) it does briefly touch on the dominant, G, but seems to recoil from it quickly, and on the second occasion that it reaches that harmonic plateau it wrestles about with the chord, skittishly repeating the little melodic tag that precedes 'though I know I'm very sick'. The chorus, if such it be, uses a standard blues progression with a rising bassline, though the organ-saturated treatment here gives it an ecclesiastical and highly Procolian flavour; the quavers are now grouped 3+3+3+3+2+2 over two bars, and this halting sequence seems to lug itself, Sisyphus-like, up the hill on several occasions only to collapse back under its own burden … fitting the song's theme precisely.

Nothing But The Truth / Drunk Again (CHS 2032) was released as a single on 6 April 1974 in the UK. Drunk Again was a collector’s item – like its fellow-drinking song This Old Dog it was never to see album status – until it became available as a bonus track on CD re-releases of Exotic Birds and Fruit. It is quite a typical Procol B side, uninhibited and relatively rough-edged, like Lime Street Blues, Good Captain Clack, Long Gone Geek. The performance on record is hugely enlivened by Gary Brooker's whoops and other cries (including 'let’s hear those eighty-eights!' before his own break), by the whirling organ and whining guitar, the pounding piano up at the milk-bottle extremities, and of course by the manic precision of the drum-breaks each time the hill-climbing chords give up. Arguably the melee of soloing is a bit protracted for a recorded song, but it always sounded very exciting live – from its début in Paris 8 October 1973 it surfaced occasionally, often at the end of a show, until 1977 – and the present track certainly has a live feel to it. The 1974 Musikladen Live DVD commemorates an excellent performance of the song – no acoustic guitar, and Copping energetic with tambourine!

 

• 'I've been out of weeks for ages': this is a provoking paradox to start a song; 'out of', here, seems to imply 'lacking' as in 'out of luck': the habitual drinker feels that he is losing whole weeks, thanks to his state of mind, and that this has been going on for a long time.
• 'on and off the train': the Brooker / Reid repertoire contains ghost trains and trains to Niagara – even A Salty Dog had its genesis in a train-siren – but the here we must assume that it’s the Whisky Train that the narrator has mounted and quit. 'On and off' suggests a repeating sequence, rather than a finite alternation. Incidentally to be teetotal is to be 'on the wagon' – another transport idiom relating to abstinence, or its lack. We also talk about a 'train of thought', and that is something that Keith Reid shows to be derailed in the present number.
• 'losing sheep and counting sleep': counting (imaginary) sheep has long been proposed as a means of helping oneself to get to sleep; here the terms are reversed, presumably to imply the drinker's fuddled wits. The song may allude to insomnia driving one to drink, and hence takes its place among the Procol night-torment songs (cp Something Magic, Glimpses of Nirvana). Later in the song Reid uses 'I once heard that a fly can't bird', another example of this reversal of terms, hingeing on the fact that 'fly' can be read as a noun but 'bird' is not usable as a verb, and with the refinement that the sentence is incorrect either way round. Another Procol drinking song, Good Captain Clack, uses fuddled speech – 'jumberlack' for 'lumberjack' – to represent alcoholic haze, but in fact there's a strong tradition in the UK of Nonsense-for-its-own-sake, or for the sake of the fresh world that word-play can notionally give us access to: children's playground songs such as The Twenty-First of Liverpool (see here) use similar verbal reversals 'It's the twenty-first of Liverpool, the city of July ... The goat took sick that very night and died three weeks before' and so on. Incidentally this ditty also includes 'punch my ticket', which we will find in Reid's song below.
• 'And I've drunk too much again': this is one of the songs whose title is not exactly heard during the song. Another number of the same name was on the second 1967 album by Bristol's Adge Cutler and the Wurzels, written by John Macey and Reg 'Snake'ips' Quantrill, 'the Elvis Presley of Chewton Mendip'. Their first 1967 album contained a song called Mabel, Mabel, by Adge Cutler himself: a tale of 'passion and pigs' from 'the old Arab quarter of Midsomer Norton'.
• 'But I'll take another cup': it's noticeable that the lyric rings changes on the beverage utensil, from verse to verse, and rhymes each one appropriately.
• 'Even though it dry me up': too much liquor has a dehydrating effect and can dry up a person's conversation, or an author's flow of words (a problem addressed in some detail in the next album). An alcoholic who goes for clinical cure is said to be being 'dried out'. The variant 'even though it burn me up' shares the awkward syntax, and recalls Whisky Train's 'I'm tired of burning in the flame'. To be burned up is usually 'with desire' … but whereas the Whisky Train narrator resolves to 'find a girl' as an alternative to drinking, this song presents only an old woman – Mother Hubbard – and she runs away with a chair.
• 'Though I know it's a time to pass': the context here is one of social drinking, where 'pass' signifies dropping out of the cycle of buying rounds, or resisting an offer of drink: more alarmingly, 'time to pass' could be the moment of fainting from intoxication.
• 'I will take just one more glass' / 'another drop' / 'just one more sip' / 'another shot': by varying the terms used, the drinker perhaps seeks to represent to himself that he is not compulsively repeating exactly the same behaviour. Reid refers, ruefully, to a drinking glass in the John Waite song In God's Shadow ... 'and you find a lot of wisdom there at the bottom of the glass'.
• 'The cellar is empty, the cupboard is bare': cellar and cupboard are both storehouses for food or drink, and these images of poverty and neglect again suggest the decline of the drinker's householding skills. 'Cupboard is bare' is closely related to the Mother Hubbard rhyme mentioned below. The Procol biography tells of a spate of 'literally starving' in a grim basement cellar for members of the earliest band – but Reid was not among them. Cellars do occur elsewhere in his work – 'In the cellar lies my wife' (Mabel); 'Cellar full of diamonds' (Memorial Drive); 'Put Mohammed in the cellar' (Poor Mohammed) – with markedly different contents. There might be some profit in considering this ransacked cupboard in terms of a writer's storehouse of images and inspiration, since the idea of 'emptiness' recurs in Procol Harum songs: 'got the only empty seat' (Something Following Me); 'The houses were open, and the streets empty' (Dead Man's Dream); 'The presses are empty' (Broken Barricades); 'I came home to an empty flat' (Toujours L'amour); 'So sad to see such emptiness' (Nothing But the Truth); 'broken promise empty lie' (Fool's Gold); 'I was feeling kind of empty' (Last Train to Niagara)
• 'I'm joining the church and taking to prayer': some religions or sects preach strict abstinence from alcohol.
• 'The landlord's complaining': in view of 'rent' below this landlord is probably one who lets out property to tenants; however there are landlords in public houses too; it's even been suggested that this remark implies resentment at being in thrall to the record company. As the 'landlord' is mentioned directly after 'church' some have seen it as a reference to God, complaining that the sinner has turned to prayer only in desperation, not in penitence.
• 'cos the rent is outstanding': 'outstanding' means 'unpaid' here, not 'remarkable'.
• 'Old Mother Hubbard's ran off with the chair': 'ran off with' often has connotations of elopement (cf Jailhouse Rock: 'if you can't find a partner use a wooden chair') but is more likely to be a matter of confiscating the last stick of furniture, in lieu of payment of rent or to provoke departure, the tenant's cash having all been spent on drink. In any event, the image is one of sheer desolation. Old Mother Hubbard is a nursery rhyme character, who went to fetch her dog a bone but found the cupboard was bare. It was written in 1805 by Sarah Catherine Martin at Kitley in Devon (in the house of John Pollexfen, bastard: Mother Hubbard may have been the housekeeper there.) This fourteen-verse nonsense rhyme borrows from tradition in its first three stanzas, which had already appeared on sheet music. In each of them Mother Hubbard goes off to get something for the dog, who is doing something totally unrelated in the last line. She visits a baker's, an undertaker's, an alehouse, a tavern, a fruiterer's, a tailor's, a hatter's, a barber's, a cobbler's, a seamstress, a hosier. In the last verse a dame makes a curtsy and the dog bows … as he will do in Taking the Time in the next Procol album. The only mention of a chair comes in Stanza 5, where the dog sits in it
• 'Come on Captain, punch my ticket': this enigmatic line is marvellously delivered on the record, and has attracted a certain amount of speculation. The Captain is a significant presence in A Salty Dog, and makes a brief return in the unpublished Last Train to Niagara; but surely the prime candidate here is Captain Clack, perhaps a fellow drinker to the present narrator. 'Captain' is a slang word associated with money: in the 60s it was Australian slang for someone with money to spend on his mates [in the Copping video Keith Reid declares that 'Peter Clack' is 'a friend of the band, he's an Australian gentleman']. In the 1950s in the same region 'Captain Cash' was the member of a gang who, having recently come into money, would be expected to pay for drinks. As for 'punching the ticket', contemporary mentions found on the web suggest that the phrase is being used to mean 'mark my card' or 'hunt me down' ("Thanks, guys. I thought they were about to punch my ticket back there (here … see also here and here)). But a more established use belongs in the world of public transport (the train image again) where a ticket is punched, with a machine, to validate it for the particular journey. 'Punch' is of course the name of an alcoholic drink, and brings to mind notions of being 'punch drunk'. 'Ticket' is also slang for a tab of LSD (the narrator buys one in A Rum Tale).
• 'Call my mother's name': the mother's name is supposedly one of a man's dearest memories (it's also a commonly-chosen idea for a password, as it is private and impossible to forget it). Mothers are uncommon in the Reid songs: 'Can't you hear me mother calling you?' (Crucifiction Lane); 'you have caused your mother great distress' and 'you wouldn't take your mum's advice': (The Piper's Tune); fathers get a brief look-in during 'Something for the mums and dads' (TV Ceasar); otherwise there is only the Dalai Lama in Glimpses of Nirvana. 'Call my mother's name' has something of the flavour of a prayer, even a lost cause: it is certainly very different in tone from 'Call my mother'.
• 'I will take another shot': a 'shot' is a measure of liquor, such as rum, but it can also refer to narcotic drugs. 'Take another shot' is blissfully ambiguous, since it often means 'have another go' in contexts where the persistence would be applauded.