One of the wonderful songs on the classic 1973 album Band on the Runby Paul McCartney and Wings is “Picasso’s Last Words (Drink to Me).” Having heard the song many times, I was not too surprised to learn that the song was based on Picasso’s actual last words. But I was amazed to discover that Dustin Hoffman gave McCartney the topic of the song and encouraged the songwriter to write a song about the painter’s last words.
In the video below, both McCartney explain how “Picasso’s Last Words” arose out of Hoffman’s curiosity about the song-writing process. During a dinner party held by Paul and Linda McCartney in Montego Bay, Jamaica, Hoffman asked McCartney how he wrote songs. Then, Hoffman asked McCartney to write a song.
As the two men discussed topics, Hoffman remembered reading about painter Pablo Picasso’s last words in a recent Time magazine. The April 23, 1973 issue featured an article entitled “Pablo Picasso’s Last Days and Final Journey,” wherein it was reported that Picasso had said to his friends, “Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can’t drink anymore.” Then, Picasso went to bed and died in his sleep.
Hoffman, remembering the story, asked McCartney to base a song on those words. And McCartney came up with an excellent song. Below, both Hoffman and McCartney explain how “Picasso’s Last Words” was created.
Below is a video of McCartney and Wings performing “Picasso’s Last Words (Drink to Me),” with lead vocals from both McCartney and Denny Laine, before the group follows up with the song “Richard Cory.”
On a tribute show in honor of Kenny Rogers, one of the members of the First Edition described how Kenny Rogers and the First Edition came to record “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” in 1969. It’s a story about how a classic recording came together through circumstances and time pressure.
“You Have 10 Minutes”
The band was in the studio and learned that they only had ten minutes left when the producer asked them if they had anything they could quickly record. The album needed one more song, so the producers just wanted a song to use as filler on the album.
Kenny Rogers replied that they knew a Mel Tillis song called “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.” So the band played the song, and producers completed the recording with just a couple of takes. Rogers, who was in his early 30s, had a voice that captured an older man’s weariness at a frustrating relationship with his wife.
The completed song went on the album. And then it became a huge hit.
Themes in the Unusual Song
It is not surprising that the song became a hit because it is so unusual. The disturbing lyrics are sung by a disabled man fearful of his wife going to town for love. He pleads for her not to cheat on him while he is alive, reminding her he will be dead soon.
In addition to the sexual innuendo in the song, there is violence too, as the man’s injuries are from “that crazy Asian war.” And his begging and understanding turns to anger toward the end: “And if I could move I’d get my gun / And put her in the ground.” At the end, the wife is leaving and the singer prays for her to turn around.
In the hands of Kenny Rogers and the New Edition, there is something disturbing about the song. Outside of country music and hip-hop, you rarely hear similar dark themes in pop songs.
When listeners first heard the title of “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” many of them might have sensed something familiar, recalling the 1958 Johnny Cash hit about a mother begging her son to avoid violence called “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town.” The new song took the violence of the Cash song and added sexual anguish, reflecting the openness of the 1960s for discussing such topics.
Although “Ruby” is a traditional country song, this recording was loved by young people too. Perhaps they connected with the young band, or perhaps they saw an anti-war sentiment underlying the tale.
Other Recordings of “Ruby”
Kenny Rogers and the First Edition were not the first to have a hit with “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.” Two years earlier in 1967, Johnny Darrell had a hit country recording of the song.
Darrell’s version is sad without being as disturbing as the Kenny Rogers version. The author of the song, Mel Tillis, performed the song too.
But the Nimoy version is not the oddest recording of the song. For the weirdest version, check out the one by actor Walter Brennan.
Jon Bon Jovi recorded a different song with a similar title, apparently acknowledging the “Ruby” song with his title, “Janie, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.”
For another modern interpretation, check out a live performance of “Ruby” by The Killers. The band often perform the song and included it on their CD of rarities and B-sides, Sawdust.
What About the Other Side?
Finally, lost in the discussion of the song is the woman’s viewpoint. Geraldine Stevens, also known as Dodie Stevens, recorded an answer song in 1969. In her song, she takes the woman’s point of view, using the same music with the title, “Billy, I’ve Got to Go to Town.”
In the “Billy” song, Ruby tells her side of the story, explaining that her husband is still her man but bemoaning his jealousy. She does not explain why she has to go to town, though: “You’ve given all you had to give and now it’s up to me . . . Billy for God’s sake trust in me.”
Is she going to work? Prostituting herself to get money for them to live? We do not get an answer in this answer song.
All of the different versions of “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” have their merits. But none of those recordings quite capture the unusual and disturbing nature of the song or reflect the turbulent era in which it was recorded in the way that Kenny Rogers and the First Edition did in those ten minutes when they rushed to fill an album.
In the Temptations classic “I Could Never Love Another (After Loving You),” the singer’s lover has just told him that she is leaving and he begs her to stay, pleading he could never love another. Many sources explain that the song, and in particular the line, “You’ve taken away my reason for livin’,” were based on a true story.
The story behind the song is that Rodger Penzabene, the songwriter of “I Could Never Love Another” and the similarly themed “I Wish It Would Rain” from the same album, lost his wife to another man. Penzabene and his wife had met as youths at Mumford High School. But sometimes love does not last forever. Reportedly he had taken his wife back after she had an affair, but she ended up leaving him after all. As the album with “I Could Never Love Another” climbed the charts, Penzabene killed himself on New Year’s Eve in 1967.
Nothing makes the story more convincing than the lead vocals on “I Could Never Love Another” by the great David Ruffin, who also died too soon from a tragic death. The way Ruffin sings the word “believe” in the first line immediately conveys the heartbreak and pain that permeates the entire song.
To the degree the backstory is true, though, we can never really know. Penzabene wrote the great song, and it seems he felt that heartbreak. But suicide is a complicated act. If everyone who is deeply heartbroken killed herself or himself, our species would have died out long ago. No doubt Penzabene’s feelings about his loss contributed to his final act, but I suspect there is more to the story.
Penzabene’s wife Helga Penzabene has tried to set the record straight by clarifying that Rodger did not kill himself over her. In 2012, she wrote in the comments to a post on Elvis Needs Boats that she was alive and well, living in Mount Clemens, Michigan. She has remarried twice, most recently divorced, and she still sings. She reported that she was working on a book about her life with Rodger. Hopefully it will help clear up the full story about him.
I suspect, though, that whatever is written in the book, many will still choose to believe the less complex heartbroken suicide version. We need tragic heroes, and the song is too good and the Temptations too awesome to believe that the songwriter did not kill himself after losing his reason for living.
Check out other posts in our series “The Story Behind the Song.” What is your favorite heartbreak song? Leave your two cents in the comments.
One of my favorite songs by John Prine is “Lake Marie,” which first appeared on Lost Dogs + Mixed Blessings (1995). The song, which is also a favorite of Prine’s, tells a love story intertwined with history, legend, murder, and heartbreak. One may interpret the song in a number of ways, but John Prine based some of the images on real people and places.
“Lake Marie” The Song
The tale of the peaceful waters of “Lake Marie” can be divided into three segments. First, the song begins with a story about Native Americans along the Illinois-Wisconsin border discovering two white babies. Although it is unclear how the Native Americans learn the names of the two babies, they name their Twin Lakes after the two little girls. The smaller and less fair lake is named “Lake Marie” after the less fair baby.
In the second part of the song, the singer tells about falling in love with a woman at Lake Marie. Many years later, the two go to Canada to try to save their crumbling marriage.
The third part of the song tells of a crime scene, where police find two naked bodies, apparently by Lake Marie. The singer then brings this third part of the story back to his lost love: “All the love we shared between her and me was slammed / Slammed up against the banks of Old Lake Marie.”
Below, Prine performs “Lake Marie” in 2010 at the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival.
What Inspired John Prine to Write “Lake Marie”?
There are in fact two lakes like in the song, Lake Marie and Lake Elizabeth. A John Prine fansite, the John Prine Shrine, explains how Prine came to write the song. While Prine was in Wisconsin for a show, a crew member told Prine a tale about the local Lake “Marie” (actually, it is “Lake Mary”). As the crew member told a mysterious tale about the lake, Prine decided he wanted to visit the lake. So he and the crew member drove twenty-five minutes to see the lake.
After seeing the lake, Prine and his brother visited a library to read stories about the lake. There, Prine discovered that Lake Marie and its sister lake, Lake Elizabeth, were named after two babies discovered by a Native American tribe.
From there, Prine began writing the song that began with the baby story. The Prine Shrine explains:
But after that [first verse], John went into some fictional story-telling about a marriage on the rocks, and a shadowy double murder that took place in the proximity of Lake Marie. “When I was done, it was exactly what I wanted. I guess the point of the song is that if the Indians hadn’t named the lakes after a couple of white girls, they would still be peaceful waters.” (Puckett 15)
What About the Dead Bodies?
And then there is the crime scene in the story. In an interview in No Depression, Prine explained that the dead bodies in the third part of the song were inspired in part by Chicago news footage he saw as a kid about a series of murders.
Regarding the bodies in the song, though, on various discussion sites, listeners debate the relationship between the story of the narrator and the double-murder at the end. Is the narrator one of the victims of the crime along with his lover (or former lover), or is the narrator the perpetrator of a murder-suicide? Or, is the narrator just someone watching about the murder on TV?
I lean toward the latter interpretation. It seems that the narrator is seeing the story on television. That explains why he is seeing it in black and white: “You know what blood looks like in a black and white video? / Shadows!”
The TV interpretation is consistent with Prine’s statements about the song. The crime scene at the lake seems to reflect on how the land had changed since the white people came and took the land from the Native Americans.
This TV interpretation also fits with another quote from Prine. He reportedly said that the reference to the TV coverage of the murders was not a particular murder. He knew it seemed like a sharp left turn in the song, “but when I got done with it, I kind of felt like it’s what the song needed right then.”
A Great Song
The love story and its struggles and its heartbreak, though, are what tie the song together and make it a classic, not to mention Prine’s wonderful emphasis on certain words and syllables as he talks through the lyrics. It is a brilliant song. Heck, it is Bob Dylan’s favorite John Prine song, which says a lot.
As Prine explained generally about his songs in a 1970 article by movie critic Roger Ebert about the then-young singer, “In my songs, I try to look through someone else’s eyes, and I want to give the audience a feeling more than a message.”
So enough with the analysis, and you should just enjoy the feeling here in a more recent version of “Lake Marie” on Sessions at West 54th, in a John Prine performance that one commenter called, “Arguably, the best 10 mins of music on You Tube.”
One of the many benefits we have gained from the resurgence of country singer Marty Brown has been his outstanding song “Whatever Makes You Smile.” It is one of those songs that continues to sound better each time we hear it.
In this video with his wife Shellie Brown, Brown explains how he came to write the song, first coming up with the groove and the opening lines, and then “it was off to the races.” He wrote the song in about thirty minutes. Shellie also explains how Marty wrote it both for her and for his ailing mom. Check out the video, which also includes a live performance of the song.
One of the wonderful songs on the classic 1973 album Band on the Run
(1995). The song, which is also a favorite of Prine’s, tells a love story intertwined with history, legend, murder, and heartbreak. One may interpret the song in a number of ways, but John Prine based some of the images on real people and places.
(1997), the various artist collection 
(2001).
