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Write Away Magazine - June Issue

The Lyric writers magazine

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Lord, Won’t You Buy<br />

Me A Mercedez Benz<br />

Mercedes Benz<br />

Janis Joplin<br />

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz<br />

My friends all drive Porches I must make<br />

amends<br />

Worked hard all my lifetime no help from<br />

my friends<br />

So oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes<br />

Benz<br />

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a color T.V.<br />

Dialing for dollars is trying to find me<br />

I wait for delivery each day until three<br />

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a color T.V.<br />

Lord won't you buy me a night on the town<br />

I'm counting on you Lord please don't let<br />

me down<br />

Prove that you love me and buy the next<br />

round<br />

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a night on the<br />

town<br />

Songwriters: BOB NEUWIRTH,<br />

JANIS JOPLIN, MICHAEL<br />

MCCLURE<br />

1970<br />

It’s Thursday, Oct. 1, at the Sunset Sound<br />

recording studio in Los Angeles. Janis Joplin<br />

asks producer Paul Rothchild to roll tape.<br />

She has a song she’d like to sing.<br />

The services of backing band Full Tilt Boogie,<br />

present and ready for action, will not be necessary.<br />

Joplin steps to the microphone and<br />

makes a declaration. “I’d like to do a song of<br />

great social and political import,” she says, a<br />

twinkle in her eye. “It goes like this.” Then she<br />

begins to sing, exercising soulful control over<br />

her enormous, whiskey-soaked voice: “Oh<br />

Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz? /<br />

My friends all drive Porsches, I must make<br />

amends …”<br />

“Mercedes Benz” is a lonely blues tune about<br />

the illusory happiness promised (but rarely<br />

delivered) by the pursuit of worldly goods, a<br />

hippie-era rejection of the consumerist ideals<br />

that Joplin saw growing up as a self-described<br />

“middle-class white chick” in Port Arthur,<br />

Texas. She had come to California in the early<br />

’60s and quickly earned a place as one of the<br />

leading musical lights in a generation that<br />

shared her utopian anti-materialism. When<br />

Joplin sang, in the second and third verses of<br />

“Mercedes Benz,” for “a color TV” and “a night<br />

on the town,” she knew all too well that neither<br />

would bring her peace. “It’s the want of<br />

something that gives you the blues,” she once<br />

said. “It’s not what isn’t, it’s what you wish<br />

was that makes unhappiness.”<br />

20 www.writeawaymagazine.co.uk

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