Chuck Taylor Drove

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a car door, gravel, a trunk lid opening)
Nineteen twenty-one. A salesman with a trunk full of shoes.

[Verse 1]
He wasn't a star. Let's just say that at the start.
He played a little ball, he had a decent heart,
but what Chuck could do was talk, and what Chuck could do was drive,
and he ran a clinic in every gym in the country he could find.
Hotel to hotel. Gym to gym to gym.
No home address for years. Just a road that carried him.

[Chorus]
Chuck Taylor drove. That's the whole of it.
Chuck Taylor drove and he put his name on it —
nineteen thirty-two, on a little circle patch,
and the shoe outran the man and the man never caught it back.
Chuck Taylor drove. Sixty million pairs.
No royalty. No cut. Just the name that's still up there.

[Verse 2]
Now the shoe went everywhere the man had never been:
to the punk clubs, to the art schools, to the kids on the screen,
to the stages and the skateparks and the feet of people born
forty years past the morning that the salesman's heart gave out.
Nineteen sixty-eight, they put him in the Hall.
Nineteen sixty-nine, he was gone. That's all.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
There's a word for what he was and the word is not "inventor."
He didn't make the shoe. He just went and got it entered
into every gymnasium in every little town —
he shook the hands. He drove the miles. He wrote the orders down.
That's not a lesser thing. That's the harder thing by far.
The shoe is on a wall in a museum. He is not.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(engine turning over, fading down a road)
Ask a hundred people whose name that is.
They'll tell you it's a shoe.
It's a man. It was a man.