IS CHICAGO, IS NOT CHICAGO
[This song's lyrics]

Once, tripping in the metropolitan capital of Illinois, I came up with this theory that everything outside my body was Chicago and all within was not. A nice simple way to look at the world. I would point at, like, a chair and say "Is Chicago," and then at my chest, and say, "Is not Chicago." This entertained me for a good twelve hours or so.

Utter nonsense, actually. The guitar lick on the "Schools he bombs, he bombs" part comes from this kid I went to school with named Matt Swift. He played it incessantly, and so it was dubbed "The Swift Lick."

The five percent nation of fill-in-the-blank. Live, I fill in the blank with whatever comes into my head at the time. People will come up to me on the street and be like, "Yo, Doughty, the five percent nation of McNugget." Once I said thename of a girl I knew and was approached angrily by this other girl, "Hey you made her a five percent nation, when are you going to make me a five percent nation?"

Scathing indictment of Hall and Oates? No, the story of a white junkie traveling salesman who overdoes in a motel bathroom. My deepest hope is that this will eventually be railed against on a Christian cable network--the "six hundred and sixty six" line revealing my hidden Iron Maiden influence. "Thirty three degrees" is a reference to the Masons--the highest rank in Masonry being the 33rd. I remember reading Malcolm X talking about Masons in his autobiography, andhim saying something to the effect of, "The devil has only 33 degrees of knowledge, Allah has 360." Pro-Islam or rampantSatanism? You make the call

Again, sounds nice, means nothing. But we are, in fact, practicing Satanists

Boy, girl, etcetera. The open plain, yay.

Kind of a weird hallucination about the hell of my imagined future life as a writer I once had.

The actual real-life Moon Sammy is a security guard at NYU who wore a rent-a-cop uniform with a badge that read, "Moon Sammy." A bunch of unconnected quotes from the book of Revelations, Chapter 10, are thrown in at the end. Again, this theme of Satanism.

Boy, girl, planet-destroying death ray, etc.

An actual narrative! A girl is looking into a pool of oil in a gutter that's streaming from a wrecked car. She sees the reflection of the moon in the oil, and then the silhouette of a burglar over the moon as he jumps from one building to the other. The moral: don't smoke in gas stations.

More fun words that mean nothing.

I had a job working at a club called The Knitting Factory as a doorperson. One night, zooted no doubt, I was selling tickets as another person checked names off the guest list, and I started chanting, "I got the tickets and you got the list!" much to the annoyance of my co-worker. Finding this not particularly songworthy, we tried out a couple of soundalikes in rehearsal, my favorite of which was "You get Jim Backus and I'll get Koresh." We finally settled on 'You get the ankles and I'll get the wrists,' and it evolved into (don't slap me) a song about throwing an externalized conception of oneself off a building. We still hear many happy misinterpretations of this one, the most common of which is "You get the eggrolls and I'll get the rice."

Boy, girl, automatic weapons, fire, etc.

I was walking over on lower Second Avenue with my guitar, and this drunken man walks up to me and goes, "Hey, excuse me, how do you get a white woman to love you?" Bright boy that I am, I answered, "Uh, try writing her a song." "You write her a song, you got a guitar," he answered indignantly. "Her name's Janine."