FAWM: "Eight Short Tons"

Eight Short Tons

There is no demo for this song.

Liner Notes

This is all Estgar's fault.

Somehow, the Florence Oregon exploding whale of 1970 had to be a shanty-like song. It's sounding very Barrett's Privateers in my head, but who knows where it might go - the explosion engineers sure didn't!

Lyrics

A whale once sailed the ocean blue Down the ocean highway somewhere new To the Oregon sands to rest his head Til highway patrol came along and said

“This 'aint no place for a whale to sail And swimming him away will be a fail So off to the armory we must go For off this beach this whale must blow”

He was eight short tons of blubber and might And he’s sailing awful far Flying through the air without a care Til he lands right on your car

Well the whale they packed to the very brim With a half-ton dynamite, fierce and grim With a “three two one” they lit the match Hoping for small blublets, hard to catch

With a mighty boom that whale blew wide The resulting cloud was hard to hide All birds took flight and reporters cover From the raining chunks of charred whale blubber

He was eight short tons of blubber and might And he’s sailing awful far Flying through the air without a care Til he lands right on your car

Eight hundred feet the blast flew high Leaving dents in roofs and no eye dry Landlubbers fled as the whale-hide strew In Florence, Oregon a legend grew

So if you’ve a whale washed on your shore Remember this tragic tale of yore Find a pit, find a fire, find a hungry bite Just don’t reach out for your dynamite

He was eight short tons of blubber and might And he’s sailing awful far Flying through the air without a care Til he lands right on your car

Comments

@newukenewyork 2w

“Fierce and grim” is right — I’ve seen the news footage! Whew! There’s a good rhythm here, feels musical already.

@shuttlebat 2w

I was shown the news footage a few weeks ago, which was a delight, but somehow the wiki made it better? "A military veteran with explosives training who happened to be in the area warned that the planned twenty cases of dynamite was far too much, and that 20 sticks (8.4 lb or 3.8 kg)[9] would have sufficed, but his advice went unheeded.[4]"