Chats – "Smoko" (2017)

I’m on smoko

So leave me alone!

Tom Sietsema is the restaurant critic for the Washington Post.  Every Wednesday, he hosts an online Q&A session for his readers.  A selected few of the online questions and answers appears in the print edition of the newspaper on Fridays.  

Most of his questions are from people who want a restaurant recommendation for a birthday or anniversary celebration, a special meal with out-of-town visitors, or some other occasion.  They state the time and day of the week they want to dine, note the type of cuisine they prefer, and almost always specify that they are looking for an eatery with outdoor seating.  (Sietsema’s readers must be the most covid-fearful people in the country.)

Here’s one of the questions that Sietsema and his editors chose to include in his print-edition column last week:

My sons are coming to DC for Easter weekend  and we are hoping to share brunch on Sunday morning in honor of my milestone birthday.  They will be staying at the Watergate [Hotel] and would like to eat there.  Do you know if their restaurants are open and, if so, are they offering a Sunday brunch?

Here is Sietsema’s answer:

It's been years since I visited Kingbird , the restaurant within the Watergate, but I see it’s open on Sunday afternoons. (Good luck finding a menu online, though!) Wish I could be of more help.

Here’s what Sietsema’s response should have been:

Lady, why the hell are you bothering me?  Just call the f*cking restaurant and ask them!

*     *     *     *     *

I visited the Kingbird’s website to make sure it had the restaurant’s phone number.  (It did.)

Like Sietsema, I was unable to find the restaurant’s menu online.  (There’s a link to the menu, but it’s not functioning properly.)

But I did find this information about the restaurant’s hours:

Kingbird is open for breakfast weekdays from 6:30 am – 10:30 am and weekends 6:30 am – 11:00 am.  Or join us for High Tea on Saturday and Sunday 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm.

In other words, the restaurant will be open for breakfast until 11:00 am on Easter Sunday.  I don’t know if that’s late enough to qualify as “brunch” or not – maybe the woman who wrote Sietsema was hoping to eat at noon or even little later.

Sietsema didn’t bother telling her that Kingbird was open for breakfast until 11:00 pm on Sundays.  Instead, he told his reader, “I see [that Kingbird is] open on Sunday afternoons.”

The woman explicitly stated that she and her sons were hoping to have brunch on Easter morning – not Easter afternoon.  So I’m not sure why in the world Sietsema told her the restaurant was open for afternoon tea – after all, she wanted to have brunch, not tea – but didn’t tell her about the breakfast hours.

*     *     *     *     *

Let’s review the bidding.

In this corner, we have a Washington Post reader who wants to know if a particular restaurant will be open for brunch on Easter Sunday.  Instead of simply calling up the restaurant and asking, she e-mails a restaurant critic.

And in this corner, we have a restaurant reviewer who not only is too lazy to call a restaurant to ask if they will be open for brunch on Easter Sunday but also can’t be bothered to read his reader’s inquiry carefully – she asks him if the restaurant will be open on Easter morning, and he responds by telling her that the restaurant’s website says it will be open (for afternoon tea only) on Easter afternoon.

The final line of his response – “Wish I could be more help” – couldn’t be more insincere.  If Sietsema really meant that, he should have called the stupid restaurant himself.

*     *     *     *     *

Sietsema gets a lot of questions during his weekly online Q&A sessions.  Why choose this one for the Washington Post print edition?   

For one thing, it’s likely of very narrow interest.  The reader is asking whether a particular restaurant offers brunch on one particular day of the year.  (She’s not asking whether the restaurant is open for brunch on Sundays generally, but whether it’s open for brunch on Easter Sunday.)  How many other readers are likely to be interested in the reply?

But if you do choose to run this question in the paper, why not take two minutes to call the frigging restaurant yourself so you can answer it?  It’s like an advice columnist who prints a question from a woman who caught her husband wearing her underwear and wants to know what she should do, and then answers “Beats me!”   

It reminds me of my eighth-grade civics teacher’s favorite pronouncement when he was asked why the government had done something:  “When the blind lead the blind, we all go in the ditch together.” 

*     *     *     *     *

When I was a student, I had a number of blue-collar summer jobs – like unloading trucks and rail cars at a grocery warehouse  – where workers got a scheduled “coffee break” in the morning and another one in the afternoon.  

These breaks lasted ten or fifteen minutes, and were paid – you didn’t have to clock out during coffee breaks.  (They were written into union contracts.) 

You didn’t have to drink coffee, of course – I usually ate half a sandwich and had a carton of milk or a can of Dr. Pepper on my coffee breaks.

I remember one job where a bunch of the guys on my shift would spend their coffee breaks playing liar’s poker – that’s a variant of regular poker that utilized the serial numbers of dollar bills instead of  playing cards.  The winner of each hand got a dollar bill from each player, and the liar’s-poker players I worked with didn’t waste any time – they managed to play several dozen hands before the whistle blew and we had to go back to work.

In addition to these scheduled coffee breaks, the guys I worked with who smoked felt entitled to take quick cigarette breaks every so often.  (They smoked during coffee breaks as well, of course.) 

“Smoko” is the Australian slang term for a cigarette break.  It can also refer to a short coffee (or tea) break that doesn’t involve smoking.

I’ve never been to Australia, but I understand that hourly workers “Down Under” feel very entitled to their smokos.  Heaven help you if you try to get a worker who’s on smoko to respond to your request for help.

“I’m on smoko,” he’ll probably tell you. “So leave me alone!” 

Click here to watch the official music video for “Smoko,” which went viral after it was released in 2017 by the Chats, an Australian punk-rock band.

Click on the link below to buy that record from Amazon:

Rolling Stones – "Parachute Woman" (1968)

Parachute woman

Land on me tonight

“Subtle” is not the first word that comes to mind when you’re trying to describe Rolling Stones song lyrics.  Their lyrics are more typically blunt and explicit.

That’s true of songs like “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” “Honky Tonk Women,” “Brown Sugar,” and “Some Girls,” and it’s certainly true of “Parachute Woman,” a lesser-known Stones song that was released in 1968 on the Beggars Banquet album.  Its lyrics are about as subtle as a captive bolt pistol – that’s the slaughterhouse tool that Javier Bardem uses as a murder weapon in No Country for Old Men:

*     *     *     *     *

Did I phone this one in?  

Yes, I did.  But gimme a break – I’ve been busier than a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest trying to finish up two very special upcoming posts that I hope to finalize and post on 2 or 3 lines very soon.

Click here to listen to “Parachute Woman."

Click on the link below to buy the record from Amazon:

Otis Redding – "Love Man" (1969)

I'm six-feet-one, weigh two-hundred-and-ten

Long hair, real fair skin

I’m long-legged and I’m outta sight

The rumor is true – Otis Redding did, in fact, write “Love Man” about little ol' moi!

His numbers are a little bit off.  I’m actually a little taller than six-feet-one, and I weigh closer to 200 than 210.

But Redding’s numbers are close enough for government work (as I used to say when I worked for the government).

He’s a “Love Man,” too!

And the rest of the song’s description – “outta sight,” etc. – is just spot on, boys and girls.

*     *     *     *     *

“Love Man” was released on the album of the same name about 18 months after Redding and six others died in a plane crash on December 10, 1967 while en route to Madison, WI.  It was the third of four posthumous albums released between 1968 and 1970 that featured tracks recorded in 1967.

“Love Man” is one of the many records I might have never heard were it not for the Sirius/XM “Underground Garage” channel.

Click here to listen to “Love Man.”

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Beatles – "I'm a Loser" (1964)

And so it’s true, pride comes before a fall

I’m telling you so that you won’t lose all

To answer Tennessee, or not to answer Tennessee – that was the question.

To be precise, that was the final question at trivia this week – the question that caused my team to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune yet again:

Which two states that border each other are tied for the highest number of borders shared with other states – with eight each?

In other words, we were asked to name the two states that are bordered by the most  states – each of which touches eight other states (including one another). 

*     *     *     *     *

I wrote a few days ago that my Tuesday night trivia team had gone from being a trivia juggernaut (winning seven of nine weekly contests in December and January) to being a trivia cowflop, going oh-for-four in the most recent competitions.

That oh-for-four streak is now – horrible dictu – an OH-FOR-FIVE streak!

All because I didn’t know whether it was Kentucky or Tennessee that bordered eight states.

I knew that Missouri was one of correct answers to the final questions.  I spent my first 18 years in the  “Show Me State,” and I know many obscure facts about it – including the fact that no state is bordered by more states than Missouri.  

In case you didn’t know, the eight states that border Missouri are Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska:

Do you know which two-letter state abbreviation
 has the highest value in Roman numerals? (I do!)

But it wasn’t enough to name only one of the most-bordered states – to get credit for your answer, you had to name both of them.

I knew absotively, posilutely that either Kentucky or Tennessee – both of which border Missouri – was the other state that touched eight of its fellow commonwealths.  

I knew with 100% certainty that Kentucky bordered at least seven states (Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, and Missouri).

I was equally sure that Tennessee also bordered at least seven states (Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Missouri). 

What I didn’t know was whether Kentucky also bordered Arkansas (which would have made the Bluegrass State the correct answer) or whether Tennessee also bordered Georgia (which would have made the Volunteer State the right choice).  

*     *     *     *     * 

After the host reads the final question each week, teams have exactly two minutes to turn in their answers.

I spent most of that two minutes drawing this map:

(Rand-McNally has nothing to fear from me)

If you look very closely, you’ll see that my crude cartographical effort did not show Kentucky bordering Arkansas.  It also did not show Tennessee bordering Georgia.

One of those two had to be right, and one had to be wrong.  But I was as clueless as most of you would have been when it came to figuring out which one was which.  

*     *     *     *     *

Some of you would had answered the question with something nonsensical like “New York and Connecticut.”  Connecticut borders only three other states, while New York borders six – of course, that’s counting Rhode Island, which doesn’t really border New York.  

Here’s a map showing Montauk, Long Island (which is part of New York) and Block Island (which belongs to Rhode Island).  Those two locales are separated by 21 miles of open water:

 

Officially, New York and Rhode Island share something called a “water border.”  But how you can you say that two states that are separated by 21 miles of open water border each other?  You might as well say that Florida borders Massachusetts.

I can hear you smartasses out there.  “Missouri is separated from Illinois by the Mississippi River,” you’re thinking to yourselves, “which is pretty damn wide and just as wet as Block Island Sound.”

But there are bridges over the Mississippi that connect Missouri and Illinois – the two states are physically connected.  You can stand on one of those bridges with one foot in Missouri and one foot in Illinois.  That’s a far cry from having to go 21 miles in a boat or airplane to get to from one state to one of its “bordering” states.

*     *     *     *     *

Anyway, I guessed Kentucky instead of Tennessee, and I was wrong, which made Dynamite! – that’s the name of our trivia team – a BIG FAT LOSER for the fifth consecutive week.

I could blame my teammates for our failure – I got a deer-in-the-headlights look from each of them when I asked them whether I should go with Kentucky or Tennessee – but that’s not the kind of trivia teammate I am!

Going with Kentucky instead of Tennessee was 100% on me.  God help me, but that’s my part of the world.  I’ve driven through each and every one of those states backwards and forwards, and I used actual maps to navigate instead of blindly relying on an app to get me to my destination like you young whippersnappers do.  

At one point in time I knew the answer to the question with certainly.  But that night I only remembered that it was one of two states – and close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.  (Curling and cornhole as well.)

Mea culpa . . . mea culpa . . . mea maxima culpa.

*     *     *     *     *

When our team hit oh-for-four, one of our team members said we were suffering through “a bit of a dry spell.”

That turn of phrase reminds me of an incident years ago when my family was vacationing on Cape Cod and my oldest child – he was a teenager then – drove to a local beach late one night with a friend.

When I say he drove to the beach, I mean he actually drove on to the beach, where he got stuck in the soft sand.  As luck would have it, the tide was coming in.

He called AAA, hoping to get towed to higher ground before the family car became a submarine.  But there had been a multi-car collision on the main Cape Cod highway that night, and every tow truck in Barnstable County was en route to the scene of those shenanigans.

“I’m in a bit of a bind,” he said when he called home seeking help.

“Yes, you are,” I told him.

“A bit of a bind” was a bit of understatement when it came to describing my son’s predicament.

And “a bit of a dry spell” is a bit of an understatement when it comes to describing an oh-for-four trivia losing streak.

As for an OH-FOR-FIVE streak, fuhgeddaboudit.  That’s not a bit of a dry spell, that’s f*cking Armegeddon.

*     *     *     *     *

STOP THE PRESSES!

I held this post back until I could report on what happened at trivia the week after the Kentucky-Tennessee fiasco.

What happened is that oh-for-five is now OH-FOR-F*CKING-SIX.

That night, Dynamite! was sitting somewhat uncomfortably in first place when it was time for the final question: we were ahead of the runners-up by a mere three points.

You can bet a maximum of 12 points on the final question, so we bet ten – if we answered the final question correctly, we couldn't lose.

The problem is that we rarely get the final question right.  I ran the numbers, and it looks like Dynamite! answers the final question correctly about one-third of the time.

That’s pretty typical of the teams that play Pourhouse Trivia on Tuesdays – over the past four months, roughly one-third of them have gotten the final question right.

Given that the odds against us coming up with correct answer were two to one, you might wonder why we bet anything at all.  Why not sit tight and hope that the teams within striking distance would step on their d*cks and get the final answer wrong instead of taking a risk and beating ourselves?

That is a VERY good question.  It turned out that if we had bet zero, we would have finished in first place.

What’s ironic about this result is that it was the mirror-image of my experience the previous Thursday, when I played with a different group of teammates at a different brewery.  That night, we had been in second place, three points out of the top spot, when the final question rolled around.  

If one team got the final answer wrong and the other team got it right, the team that got it right was almost certain to beat the team that got it wrong regardless of the amounts that were wagered.  But if both of us got it wrong or both of us got it right, the amounts that we bet would determine the outcome.

We bet six, hoping that the top team would bet ten.

If they did bet ten and got the answer right, they would win – no matter what we bet.  They had the lead, which put them in the driver’s seat.

But what if both teams were wrong?  If they bet ten and we bet six and we were both wrong, we would win by one point.  

AND THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED!  Our strategy turned out to be perfect!

“So why didn’t you learn from that experience Tuesday night, when the tables were turned and you were in first place by three points?” you may be asking.  “Why did you make the same final-question bet when you were leading by three on Tuesday that the other team made the previous Thursday when they were leading by three – a bet that blew up in your face just as it had blown up in the other team’s face?”

I guess that’s why they call us Dynamite!

*     *     *     *     *

I almost forgot to share the final question from Tuesday night – that question that knocked us out of first place when we were unable to answer it correctly:

Winner of eight Oscars including Best Picture, which 1980’s film holds a Guinness world record by filming a scene with an estimated 300,000 extras?

(You want the answer?  Look it up your own damn self.)

*     *     *     *     *

“I’m A Loser” is a bit of a hot mess.  The song (written by John Lennon)  is emblematic of Lennon and McCartney’s two major weaknesses as songwriters.

First, many of their songs were created by stitching together song fragments that didn’t mesh with one another very smoothly – sort of like Dr. Frankenstein created his monster by stitching together parts from different bodies that didn’t look quite right together.  (Listen to the instrumental break before the third verse.  The first half is a Dylanesque harmonica solo, while the other half is a twangy C&W-style guitar solo that sounds nothing like the first half.)

Second, the slapdash lyrics sound like Lennon spent all of five minutes coming up with them.  

The first line quoted above illustrates my point.  It’s bad enough that Lennon falls back on a cliché like “pride comes before a fall.”  It’s worse that his particular formulation of that cliché was so carelessly written that the first syllable of “before” is stressed when it’s the second syllable that should be.  (The third verse that includes that line sounds like it  was written by someone for whom English is a second language.)

*     *     *     *     *

Here’s what Lennon said about “I’m a Loser” in a 1980 interview:

That’s me in my Dylan period.  Part of me suspects I’m a loser and part of me thinks I’m God Almighty.

2 or 3 lines knows just how you felt, John.

*     *     *     *     *

Click here to listen to “I’m A Loser,” which was released in the U.S. on the Beatles ’65 album in 1964.  (And no – that’s not a typo.)

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.

Beck – "Loser" (1993)

I’m a loser, baby

So why don’t you kill me?

Every Tuesday, I take a little trip up I-270 to to Frederick, Maryland, where my daughter and her two children live.

I pick up my grandson at daycare and take him home, where I spend an hour or so playing with him and his two-year-old sister – my only granddaughter, and the apple of my eye.  After dinner, I say goodbye and head to a nearby brewery for the weekly trivia competition.

Last week, my granddaughter wanted to stay close to her mom and dad – she refused to let me hold her.  I was taken aback by her standoffishness because she’s usually very comfortable with me.

I think I know what the problem was.  After winning at trivia seven times in nine weeks in December and January, my trivia team has hit the wall – we finished out of the money the next four weeks.

My granddaughter could smell the stink of LOSER all over her grandfather.  No wonder she wouldn’t have anything to do with me.

Can you blame her?  Who wants to be cuddled by a BIG OLD LOSER?

*     *     *     *     *

The Diamond Hill-Jarvis (TX) high school football team suffered through a bit of a dry spell between 2010 and 2017, when they lost 77 consecutive football games.

My trivia team’s dry spell isn’t quite as dry as that one.  What makes it feel so bad is that Dynamite! – that’s the name of my team – was a well-oiled trivia machine in December and January, when we won seven times in nine weeks.  (I know I mentioned that seven-out-of-nine streak above, but I cling to it like a shipwrecked man clings to a life preserver.)

Since then, we’ve had ZERO first-place finishes.  

I don’t know about where you come from.  But where I come from, four weeks without a trivia win is UNACCEPTABLE!  (Hell, two weeks without a win is unacceptable!)  

I don’t expect to win every week, but OH-FOR-FOUR?  

You can f*ck your oh-for-four and the horse it rode in on!

*     *     *     *     *

Let me assure you that Dynamite! didn’t gone oh-for-four because I suddenly got stupid.

Ask anyone – I am a trivia GOD!  (Always have been, always will be.)

But as John Donne once observed, no man is an island entire of itself when it comes to trivia.  (Donne wasn’t a bad trivia player himself – if you had a question about the Bible or British literature, Donne was your guy.)  When you’re competing against teams with five, six, or even seven players, you simply cannot win all by your lonesome.  You need help!

My usual trivia teammates are the bartenders at the brewery where I go to play every Tuesday night.  

Occasionally I get some help from the cornhole “widows” – the wives and/or girlfriends of the guys who play in the weekly cornhole tournament that is held in an adjacent room at the same brewery that hosts trivia contests.  (It appears that only males are allowed to play cornhole – at least I’ve never seen a women tossing bags.)

When they tire of watching the exciting cornhole action, some of the WAGs take a break from the games and sit at the bar to have a beer and help Dynamite! out.

*     *     *     *     *

The bartenders and cornhole WAG I played with regularly during that seven-wins-in-nine-weeks streak are named Lauren, Laura, and Lara.  

I have no clue which is which – I’m not very good with names, and expecting me to distinguish women with three virtually identical monikers is unreasonable – so I can’t refer to them by name in this post.  

No matter.  I’ll just call them L1, L2, and L3.

One of the bartenders – we’ll call her L1 – turned quisling on me recently.  (Vidkun Quisling – the Norwegian politician who collaborated with Hitler in World War II – would be a good subject for a trivia question.)  

A few weeks ago, L1’s husband came to trivia accompanied by a couple of friends.  I certainly understand why L1 would want to play with her spouse.  But while the husband hasn’t played trivia since, his companions have become regulars – and L1 has continued to play with them.  

*     *     *     *     *

The cornhole WAG – let’s call her L2 – can’t really be counted on because she doesn’t show until her husband/boyfriend gets eliminated from the cornhole tournament.  (Fortunately for Dynamite!, that’s usually pretty early in the evening.)

And last week, she didn’t show up at all.  (For some reason, the cornhole tournament attracted very few players last week – maybe because they all stayed home to watch the “State of the Union” address on TV? )

*     *     *     *     *

That leaves L3 – based on outward appearances, she looks like just another bartender.  But I think she’s some kind of supervisor because she’s quite a bit older than the other bartenders and also pretty bossy.  

L3 is the most reliable teammate I have, but even she can’t always be counted on.  For one thing, she consistently gives higher priority to serving beer, collecting empty glasses, and closing out tabs than she does to helping me win at trivia.  

L3 also has a disturbing tendency to skip trivia night every so often, claiming that she is “too tired.”  I know that older women like her do tend to get tired quite easily, but I have it on good authority that the real reason L3 skips trivia night is so she can watch episodes of This Is Us.

*     *     *     *     *

L1, L2, and L3 aren’t the only people who play on my team.  There’s usually a third bartender working on trivia/cornhole nights – although that person is usually too busy to help very much.  My daughter and son-in-law occasionally will come to help me out, and I’ve been known to dragoon perfect strangers who happened to be seated at the bar near me to help fight the good fight for Dynamite!

But I’ve gotten no help from family members or random strangers the last month or so – which made the loss of L1 and the unreliability of L2 and L3 costly indeed.

Something had to be done to turn the ship around.  So after our last defeat, I had a heart-to-heart talk with L3.

“When you are hiring new waitstaff, you need to give much higher priority to a potential hire’s trivia abilities!” I told her.  “And when you assigning shifts, you need to make sure the bartenders who will contribute the most to Dynamite! are scheduled to work Tuesday evenings!”

“And it wouldn’t hurt if you scheduled an extra bartender to work on Tuesday nights,” I added.  “That way, the smartest servers can focus on trivia while the ones with room-temperature IQs do all the work.”

I’ve offered to assist with hiring bartenders and scheduling their shifts.  (I’ve never actually owned or operated a small business, so you might question whether I would know what I was doing.  But how hard can it be?  Seriously . . .)

*     *     *     *     *

In the next 2 or 3 lines, I’ll tell you what happened at trivia last Tuesday, when Dynamite! tried to snap its oh-for-four trivia streak.  (Hint: it didn’t end well.)

In the meantime, let's listen to “Loser,” which was a surprise hit for the essentially homeless musician Beck David Hansen – who is better known as simply Beck:

“Loser” was originally released as a 12-inch vinyl single in 1993 by a small independent record label that went by the name Bong Load.  Only 500 copies of the record were pressed.

It somehow enough radio play in Los Angeles to get the attention of an A&R guy at a major label, and the rest is history.  “Loser” eventually sold 600,000 copies in the U.S. alone, and topped the Billboard “Modern Rack Tracks” chart.

Click here to watch the official music video for “Loser.”

Click on the link below to buy the record from Amazon:

Pretenders – "Talk of the Town" (1981)

Oh, but it’s hard to live by the rules

I never could and still never do

The rules and such never bothered you

You call the shots and they follow [ . . . ]

A “mind rhyme” – also known as a “subverted rhyme” or a “teasing rhyme” – is a rhyme that exists only in the mind of the listener.

But it didn’t get there by accident.  It got there because a poet put it there.

*     *     *     *     *

Here’s the first verse of “Sweet Violets,” a song on the first Mitch Miller & The Gang album – which I listened to about a thousand times when I was a kid:

There once was a farmer who took a young miss

In back of the barn where he gave her a

Lecture on horses and chickens and eggs

And told her that she has such beautiful

Manners that suited a girl of her charms

A girl that he'd like for to take in his

Washing and ironing, and then if she did

They could get married and raise lots of

Sweet violets, sweeter than all the roses!

You think the farmer in “Sweet Violets” is going to give the young miss a kiss (instead of a lecture), compliment her on her beautiful legs (instead of her manners), take her in his arms (instead of her taking in his washing), and marry her so they can raise lots of kids (instead of sweet violets).

Mitch Miller & The Gang

But the songwriter is rope-a-doping you.  Instead of giving you the rhyming words that you anticipate – because those words would not only complete rhyming couplets but also make sense in context – you get something entirely different.

Click here to listen to “Sweet Violets.”  Or you can call me and I’ll sing it for you over the phone.  (I memorized the words to that song when I was about ten years old, and I will never forget them.)

*     *     *     *     *

The lyrics from today’s featured song – the Pretenders’ 1981 hit, “Talk of the Town,” which was written by Chrissie Hynde – contain a pure mind rhyme:

The rules and such never bothered you

You call the shots and they follow

Hynde leaves out the “you” that you anticipate will follow “follow” and complete a rhyming couplet.  Unlike the “Sweet Violets” songwriter, she doesn’t replace “you” with a nonrhyming word – she simply stretches “follow” so its fills the space where “you” might have gone.  (Instead of “FOL-low YOU, she sings “FOL-LOW.”  There are two trochaic feet in each case, but there’s no unstressed syllable in the second example – just two stressed syllables.) 

Let’s look at the lines that precede and follow those lines:

Oh, but it’s hard to live by the rules

I never could and still never do

The rules and such never bothered you

You call the shots and they follow

I watch you still from a distance, then go

Back to my room, you’ll never know

The listener’s anticipation of hearing “follow you” instead of just “follow” at the end of the fourth line is heightened by the fact that not only does the previous line end in a word that rhymes with “you,” but so do the two lines before that one.  (“Rules” and “you” don’t constitute a perfect rhyme, but they’re close enough to make the absence of that final “you” more noticeable.)

Note also that by allowing the fourth line to end with “follow” instead of “you,” Hynde sets up rhymes with the next two lines (which end with “go” and “know”).

Think about it.  Hynde has gotten two rhymes for the price of one by leaving out “you” after “follow.”  She’s created actual rhymes with “follow,” “go,” and “know” – but she’s created an implied rhyme with the omitted “you.”

Well played, Chrissie Hynde – well played.

*     *     *     *     * 

You may think I’m missing the forest for the trees here.  

Actually, I’m missing the forest for the tree (singular) – after all, I’m talking about one word . . . or, to be more accurate, one non-word.

There’s a lot more I could say about “Talk of the Town.”  For example, there’s its gentle, wistful tone, which contrasts sharply with Hynde’s darker and harder-hitting songs (like the scornful “Pack It Up”) – it turns out that Chrissie has a soft side after all.

Chrissie Hynde

But it’s time for me to get off my Pretenders horse for a while – I’ve been riding it pretty hard, and it could probably benefit from a nice, long rest.

After a few weeks have passed, I’ll come to back to the Pretenders and do some summing up.  I’ve got two or three top-shelf Chrissie Hynde songs in my back pocket, but I want to take some time to think about them before I feature those songs on 2 or 3 lines – I want to do them justice.

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Click here to listen to “Talk of the Town,” which was a top-ten single in the UK in the spring of 1980.  It was released on the Pretenders II album in the summer of 1981.

Click on the link below to buy the record from Amazon: