Piggies – Jonah Smith
Recorded on April 20, 2009, original version recorded on September 19, 1968.
Jonah Smith: Vocals
Roger Greenawalt: Ukulele
Produced by Roger Greenawalt at Shabby Road Studio in Brooklyn, NY
About the Song
1968 was a big year for swine. Pigs were in the air.
My favorite Dada Performance Art act of the 60’s were The Yippies.
The Yippies were way ahead of their time. They were visionaries. And obsessed with pigs.
Do you know about their best piece?
On a steamy summer morning over forty years ago – Aug. 24, 1967 – about a dozen young men and women led by Jim Fourrat and Abbie Hoffman entered the visitors’ entrance to the New York Stock Exchange at 20 Broad Street. (The trading floor gallery had been open to visitors since 1939.) They waited while a member of the security staff approached; the group had previously phoned the exchange and asked for a tour, but the guards became nervous about the way that some in the group were dressed.
Still, the group went up to the visitors’ gallery, two stories above the busy trading floor. They snaked their way past exhibits extolling the virtues of the industrial revolution and the development of modern capitalism. Turning a corner, they encountered a horde of reporters and cameras.
This made exchange officials nervous. John Whighton, the captain of the exchange’s security force, told the group that no demonstration of any kind would be tolerated. Whighton asked the group for a name, and Fourrat said: “George Metesky,” and identified his group as ESSO, the East Side Service Organization (the first a reference to New York’s “Mad Bomber” from the 1950s, the second to the successor to Rockefeller’s Standard Oil). The guard wrote “George Metesky and friends” on a pad, and escorted the group up to the railing directly above the trading floor.
Immediately, the group of pranksters began throwing handfuls of one-dollar bills over the railing, laughing the entire time. (The exact number of bills is a matter of dispute; Hoffman later wrote that it was 300, while others said no more than 30 or 40 were thrown.)
Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, the leaders of this anarchist collective, were part of a long line of radical secular Jewish troublemakers. They were the ones who put pigs in the mainstream in ‘68.
Here’s an excerpt from a high school history book.
Starting in August 1968 (remember Piggies was written that September) and for a number of years afterwards, police officers were called pigs by young people, the disenchanted and even the media. This came about when a group who called themselves the Yippies protested near the 1968 National Democratic Convention in Chicago. They had a small pig named Pigasus as their presidential candidate, and when police disrupted their demonstration, they started to call the police pigs. The expression caught on. Years later, the radical leaders of the Yippies became mainstream and calling police “pigs” drifted into the past.
Pigs still have the power to shock and awe. Here’s a reading from The New York Post of April 18, 2010. We can compare how much the culture has shifted from the literal to the ironic over 40 years.
“Jason Marcus is opening a restaurant for people who “like bacon with everything” and wish that their “bowls of moules-frites would never end” in the middle of the Orthodox enclave of Williamsburg.
The pork and shellfish eatery located at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge at 229 S. Fourth St. even has a provocative name – Traif, the Yiddish word for all things non-kosher and unbecoming.
“I figured most people would not know what it meant and be curious,” Marcus, 30, said.
“I love to eat bacon and shellfish”.
Hilarious. Traif is a block away from the new improved Pies And Thighs. See you there.
So of course George is literally saying in this song that the little piggies are the police sniffing round in the dirt and they do the dirty work for bankers in starched white shirts. If George were 25 and playing in a band in Williamsburg now, the lyrics to this song would be a lot different.
“Look at all the pale Hasidim, they appear so ill.
Let us make fun of their diet when we’re high on pills;
Then we’ll fuck some models, and move to Paris.”
My point here is that it was perfect for a Beatle to write about pigs in 1968. And while through modern eyes the lyrics to Piggies are cringingly obvious and sophomoric, it needed to be said then, in a way that even children could understand. The police in Birmingham and Chicago and many other places in America in the 60’s were a threat to decent society. It’s banal now to say that the most powerful people are not necessarily good, they are just powerful. But that was not widely understood in 1968. The love affair between the government and the people that dated back to December 7, 1941 had to yet come to its inevitable messy and ugly conclusion. That’s why Nixon was so necessary, the culture had to grow up and realize that Big Brother might be a creep, and break up with him once and for all.
Piggies, like it’s ideological cousin Taxman, marks an important turning point in George Harrison’s hero journey. Before you can think for yourself and become yourself, you have to throw off the belief systems of faith and country that you happened to be born into. Before you reach the most advanced level of awareness, being one with the ukulele, you have to pass through all the other isms. And despite a lot of talk about Krishna and chanting and so on George sure spent a lot of time in enormous mansions and he certainly did have a lot of racing cars. Until his last and all too brief ukulele Zen Aloha stage he seemed stuck in the most insecure sorts of wealth displays. That does not come off as advanced.
It took his entire life to shake off materialism and reach ukulele nirvana. If only George had been able to read Peter Buffett’s new book (http://www.peterbuffett.com/books/index.html) he wouldn’t have had to waste so much time on Krishna. He would have gotten there quicker. The father in this story incidentally, is that great ukulele player, Warren Buffett.
For my father—and now for me—the essence of a good work ethic starts with meeting a challenge of self-discovery, finding something you love to do, so that work—even, or especially, when it is very difficult and arduous—becomes joyful, maybe even sacred.
When I was very young, my father mostly worked at home. He spent long hours in his office—a small, hushed room off of my parents’ bedroom—studying massive and mysterious books. These, I later learned, were things like Value Line and Moody’s—detailed statistical analyses of thousands of companies and their stocks. But if the subjects my father studied were essentially pragmatic, the concentration that he brought to the process bordered on the mystical. His “scripture” might have consisted of things like price-to-earnings ratios and breakdowns of management performance, but he could as easily have been a rabbi studying Kabbalah or a Buddhist monk puzzling over Zen koans. His focus was that fierce—that pure. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that when my father was working, he went into an altered state, a trance.
He’d emerge from his office, wearing his usual outfit of khaki pants and a worn-out sweater, and there would be an almost saintly calm about him—the calm of a person whose ego has completely merged with the task at hand.
It is a well-known fact that extreme physical effort promotes the release of substances called endorphins—natural feel-good drugs with the power to blot out pain, make time slow down, and give rise to a blissful state of well-being. My father’s affect when he was deep in work suggested that extreme mental effort released endorphins, too. Observing him at these times, I learned a simple but profound lesson. I learned that work should be demanding and intense—and that it should make us happy.
What was it about my father’s approach to work that allowed him to remain so unremittingly cheerful in the face of long hours and wearying decisions? First and foremost, it was that he really wasn’t doing it for the money. Eventually, the money came–and that was a very gratifying confirmation of the wisdom of his approach to business. But the money was a by-product, an afterthought.
What mattered was the substance of the work: exercising his boundless curiosity, testing his analyses against real world performance, living the adventure of discovering value and new possibilities.
If my father had been working mainly for the money, his efforts would have quickly dulled into a routine–a job. What has kept him sharp and engaged for all these years is the intellectual challenge, the serious and consequential game. That part of it is new every day.
This leads me to another observation about some people’s mistaken notions about what a good work ethic really is.
Some people think they’re talking about a work ethic, when what they’re really talking about is a wealth ethic.
They claim to have a high regard for labor and discipline and perseverance, but those qualities are not what they truly respect; what they respect is the wealth those qualities sometimes lead to. They honor the payoff rather than the process.
There are all sorts of moral and philosophical arguments that could be made against this inversion of values. But I’d like to offer a purely practical objection:
The problem with honoring the rewards of work rather than the work itself, is that the rewards can always be taken away.
All of us who’ve been living through dicey economic times know this only too well. Is a person a success one day and a failure the next, simply because, through no fault of her own, her firm goes out of business? Is a brilliant entrepreneur suddenly a loser because conditions change in worldwide markets?
Why would people wager their self-respect on factors so far out of their control?
A sane and durable work ethic keeps the emphasis not on fickle rewards, but on the work itself–on the passion and focus and seriousness of purpose with which the work is approached.
Those are the things that no one can take away from us.
Bravo Peter!
The New Improved Roger version of Piggies features the ridiculously great singing of Jonah Smith. Jonah was introduced to me by Genius-Mouth Leah Siegel, that’s all you need to know about his skill level. We had a gas making the track; it was very quick and painless.
Jonah’s playing May 8 at Le Poisson Rouge, I’ll be watching the show by the mixing board, come say hello.
http://events.myspace.com/Event/3134392/Jonah-Smith