Sludge

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a spoon tapping a plate, once, hard)
He sold it in 'sixty-four.
He spent the rest of his life reviewing it.

[Verse 1]
He was sixty-five years old with a service station and a dream
and a pressure cooker recipe he'd worked out in between
the truck stops and the ferry boats and everything he'd tried —
he franchised out the chicken and the chicken made him wide
enough that in 'sixty-four somebody bought the whole affair,
and they gave him two million dollars and they kept him standing there.

[Chorus]
Brand ambassador! That's the title that they gave him!
"Stand there in the white suit, Colonel, smile and wave at 'em!"
So he stood there. And he smiled. And then he opened up his mouth
and he told a newspaperman exactly what he thought:
"That gravy is SLUDGE! That's wallpaper paste!
They took my chicken and they threw the whole thing away!"

[Verse 2]
Now a normal man would've cashed it and he'd never say a word,
'cause the check has got your name on it and the name is not yours —
but the Colonel wasn't normal and the Colonel wasn't through,
he called it a "damn fried doughball" and he said it on the news.
Then he sued them. Sued the company that carried his own face.
Settled out. Kept complaining. Kept the white suit on the whole way.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
There's a kind of dignity in this I genuinely admire:
he sold the thing, he took the cash, and he never once retired
from having an opinion about what he'd made with his own hands.
Most men sign the paper and they hush. He never did.
He was a walking trademark who would not stop talking back.
That's the man. That's the whole man. That's the fact.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(spoon set down)
He never got the recipe back.
He never stopped saying so.