Tom Waits — Keith Richards...

He can run faster than a fax machine His urine is blue He smells like a campfire He was once slapped by the Queen He has walked the equivalent of three times Around the Earth Like Keith, the Phengaris rebeli caterpillar strums His bottom like a guitar and the chord attracts females At one concert in Java in the '70's Men screamed, women fainted, and a small boy Broke his arm in the chaos And it rained thousands of black worms the size of Honeybees He wrote his share of the songs from Sticky Fingers In a henhouse in Malta He once won the Hope Diamond in a poker game And in the same night lost it in a game of craps He owns a lug wrench and a tire jack made of solid gold He was born in a cloak room and had always been prone To fits of weeping followed by hysterical laughter One of his first jobs was cleaning out the lion cage At the London Zoo Like the praying mantis he has only one ear and It is located between his legs He can hold a note up to 6 minutes and has 7 or 8 notes More than the ordinary voice And they are equally sonorous and clear Hands like a woodworker Arms like a swabby A back like a soldier A mind like a detective Shoulders like a boxer A voice like a choir boy And a country western face His tunings are furiously guarded secrets He claims one open tuning he utilizes was inspired While waiting for a train in Detroit In a vacant lot, the remains of a barbed wire fence Were half circling the remains of an old foundry And there, amidst tin cans, old mattresses and dolls' heads It occurred to Keith that a guitar is -------At its most rudimentary level------- Wire that has been stretched across wood that when Strummed produces a pleasant relationship between Disparate components Noticing the wire fence in effect contained these same Ingredients, Keith took the lid of a discarded paint can and Strummed the tightly stretched fence wires Violently, rhythmically, and repeatedly Thus satisfying hhis curiosity and releasing the peculiar Voicings of the chord we all know to be the chord At the beginning of Jumpin' Jack Flash Transcribing the notes and adapting them for guitar, Keith lost none of the angular chord's mystifying and Natural jaggedness and thus, the "fence chord" was born Keith once took *my* 10,000 dollar overcoat To put down across a mud puddle To allow an octogenarian laundress Named Clementine Moorehouse to cross the street Comfortably That's Keith always the gentleman