Intro I - Live

(Spoken)
Now let me say a little somethin here maestro. Some domestic details before I do this song. I have five children, four boys and a girl, with two different wives. Surprisingly in a switch my second wife was younger than my first, it was crazy. (audience laughs) And I pay for it every fuckin day. (audience laughs) But--but in any case, irrespective of that, God bless her. And, irrespective of that, I had a friend who had the same sort of thing happen, he had three boys and girl. And his wife said if she'd had the girl first she would've thought the boys were retarded. And there's a great deal of truth in that, in that girls don't eat much mud or bump their heads into trees.

I tell you this cause with the first kid we had my wife and I were twenty-two, twenty-three--my wife was German--and expected them to eat with a fork and unreasonable things like that. And so we--it was in the days of progressive schools, so we first tried a progressive school and they sat around on, you know, little cots and got lice every couple of weeks. And some pothead would explain to you--you'd go and say, "You know, he's got lice again. You know, this is the third time." And they'd go, "Yes, we know, we know." And it didn't work out, sort of.

We sent him to a stricter school and he came home from one wearing these short kinda brown pants and my wife's eyes lit up a little bit and it worried me. But he went to school--he went to one school which is distinctive only because it graded so comprehensively. Every twenty weeks you'd get a report card that was twenty, thirty pages long, really it was. They'd break reading down ten ways and writing and everything. He was six-years-old. And he got D's and F's in every subject but one in which he got an A with an exclamation point and it was: "Meets new situations with confidence." (Randy and audience laugh)

And I'm telling you this because, you know, at the orientation of those schools, you know, they show you around this mud hut and this, you know, sand pile and they send you home. But for my last two kids--fifteen and sixteen--the orientation was such a fantastic experience, you know, sociologically and everyway just a mind numbing thing that I wanted to write about it but so as not to waste a song on something so trivial and domestic, I include within this song the reason for the failure of Marxism. It's called "The World Isn't Fair."