The Men Who Sold It

Lyrics

[Intro]
(wind across open country, a horse, a match struck and not used)
Three names. Same job. Same ending.

[Verse 1]
Wayne McLaren rode horses and he did the rodeo,
and he modelled for the cigarettes because the money was good,
and he got lung cancer at forty-nine, and he spent
what he had left of his life campaigning against them.
He testified. He said it plainly. He asked them to stop.
He died at fifty-one. His mother said his last words were "take care of the children."

[Chorus]
The men who sold it. The men who sold the freedom
and the open range and the squint into the weather.
Wayne McLaren. David McLean. Eric Lawson.
All three of them wore the hat. All three of them went the same way.
The men who sold it. Nobody planned that.
Nobody wrote that into the campaign. But there it is.

[Verse 2]
David McLean was an actor with a hundred credits,
he did the ads through the sixties, he smoked on set all day —
five packs a day, his family said, for the takes and the retakes —
and he died of lung cancer in nineteen ninety-five.
Eric Lawson wore the hat in the late seventies,
and he died in twenty-fourteen. Emphysema. Same road.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And I'm not telling you this to be cruel about the dead.
Every one of them took a job. That's all any of them did.
They were models and actors and horsemen with a bill to pay,
and none of them invented the thing they stood in front of.
But the image was a man alone and healthy in the weather,
and the men who were that image did not get to stay that way.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the wind, the match gone out)
Take care of the children.
That's what he said. Take care of the children.