The Big M

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a milkshake machine, eight of them, humming)
San Bernardino. Two brothers. One very good idea.

[Verse 1]
Dick and Mac McDonald built a kitchen like a line —
no carhops and no waiting, thirty seconds, every time.
They called it the Speedee System and they drew it out in chalk
on a tennis court behind the place, and moved their men like clockwork.
That's the invention. That's the actual thing.
The whole world eats that way now. Two brothers drew it out.

[Chorus]
The Big M! That's what they had to call it!
A man came and he bought the name and left them with the store,
and their own restaurant, the first one, the original,
could not be called McDonald's anymore!
The Big M. Their own place. Their own name gone.
And he opened one across the road and ran them into the ground.

[Verse 2]
Two point seven million dollars, split between the two,
and a handshake on a royalty they say was never honoured —
half a percent forever, nothing on paper, nothing signed,
and half a percent forever is a fortune left behind.
They were not naive men. They were careful men, in fact.
They just believed a handshake was a thing that held. It's not.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
Now Kroc did build the empire. I'll give the devil that.
The brothers wouldn't have. The brothers didn't want to.
They wanted one good restaurant and a decent quiet life,
and that is not a failure, that is a different appetite.
But the sign says nineteen fifty-five, and the brothers opened 'forty,
and a company decided which beginning is the story.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the milkshake machines wind down)
Their name is on every corner of the earth.
Neither of them owned it by the end.