Tell me about - "Get Behind the Mule."
Tom Waits: That's what Robert Johnson's father said about Robert, because he ran away. He said, 'Trouble with Robert is he wouldn't get behind the mule in the morning and plow,' because that was the life that was there for him. To be a sharecropper. But he ran off to Maxwell Street, and all over Texas. He wasn't going to stick around. Get behind the mule. . .can be whatever you want it to mean. We all have to get up in the morning and go to work. Kathleen says, "I didn't marry a man. I married a mule." And I've been going through a lot of changes. That's where Mule Variations came from.
Q: What did she mean by that?
Waits: I'm stubborn.
Q: Anything you want to add?
Tom Waits: The blue whale weighs as much as thirty elephants, is as long as three Greyhound buses, end-to-end. Remember that a giraffe can go without water longer than a camel. And even though the neck is seven feet long, it contains the same number of vertebrae as a mouse's. Seven. And a giraffe's tongue is eighteen inches long. It can open and close its nostrils at will. It can run faster than a race horse and make almost no sound whatsoever. The first giraffe ever seen in the west was brought to Rome in 46 B.C. by a little guy named Julius Caesar. Something to ponder as the day winds down.
Don's Tunes
Source: Epitaph promo interview (MSO), by Rip Rense 1999
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