For Kierkegaarde and Kant and cocoa

[Alistair]

Can you help me with translation / explanation for the above lyric from Jake’s song To Do With You
In context it is;

And if I were the simple sort of bloke
For Kierkegaarde and Kant and cocoa
Dearest, I would have no more to do with you.

I’m making good progress with the chords and tab, however a little help with understanding the above wording would be appreciated.

. . . ignorant as ever,

Alistair

[dmcgovern]

Nice one Alastair. The cocoa threw me at first – from the ridiculous to the sublime, you could say.

Kierkegaarde and Kant were erudite philosophers, and so was Nicolay Gogol http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/gogol.htm. The line above in your extract is ironic – even if the ‘simple sort of bloke’ were not so simple, she’ll still do for him.

A bit too much late-night transposing went into the lyric on this site, but a more definitive version might be found here 😉 http://joni.soc.surrey.ac.uk/~scs1ec/todowith.html .

What a brilliant song!

ATB

David 😡

[Malcy]

A brief computer programmer’s note :

Although I’ve seen transcriptions of this verse’s lyrics as "Kierkegaarde and Kant and Gogol" I have always sung this one with my heart, which originally heard it (and still does) as "… and Kant and cocoa". The other verses always have contrasting juxtapositions which are pe-empted in the lyrics :

better cooking, better looking = flawless skin and bigger dinners

and

smoother moving, tongue and grooving = better spoken, shorter strokers

So where’s the corresponding "bed-time" contrapuntal for "better read and better bed-time women" ? It’s not there if Jake just wanted three philosophers – "Kierkegaarde and Kant and Gogol" : and Jake isn’t as sloppy as that. Me – I reckon it’s "cocoa", and it’s just coincidence that there’s a thinker whose name sounds a lot like "cocoa". Otherwise it don’t make sense and doesn’t match and when does Jake do that ? Never. And certainly not in a love song to his wife. QED. !

[dmcgovern]

Oops! I was having a gentle dig at Keith whose name is on the transcription on this site, thinking the cocoa was in his veins during one of those long transcribing sessions. So before I go any further I’d better stop digging – sorry Keith!

I always took the contrasts to be from one line to another, not actually within the same line, but I hadn’t tried to analyse the song so deeply, nor ever sung it.

I think we might need the intense philosophy of Kierkegaarde and Kant (if not Gogol) to help sort this one out! I’m sure another listen will help too (duh!)

David

[KeithD]

Well, after Ian Burdon correctly picked me up on a couple of mistranscribed words in my first go at "Policeman’s Jig" I listened very carefully, on nice clear earphones, to all the lyrics, as often as was necessary for me to reach my own decision on what Jake was singing. And to my mind there’s no doubt whatsoever that Jake sings "cocoa". And all the other words I listed.

As Malcy points out, it’s in the ‘better read and better bedtime’ verse. I also plead in support "eruditer wives at night". So ‘better read’ and ‘eruditer’ for the two Ks and ‘better bedtime’ and ‘at night’ for the ‘cocoa’: a bit of erudition before bedtime, as it were, is not what Jake is after.

Also there’s the internal rhyme between "bloke" and "coc" which doesn’t happen with "Gog"

‘Simple’ (not ‘simplest’ to my ears) is irony, and also fits the metre.

[KeithD]

A general point worth making here is that the lyrics on this site have been transcribed from scratch rather than merely lifted from Edmund’s site. As a result there are differences between the lyrics on the two sites and there’s no guarantee where they do differ that those here are more authoritative. Although the people who transcribed them put their best efforts into it, that is surely also the case for the many people who contributed lyrics to Edmunds’s site (each of them individually credited there). The main difference is likely to be that Edmund’s transcriptions were made from vinyl while those here were made from CD, and with luck the increased CD clarity and the greater ease of playing a doubtful segment over and over has led to more accurate transciptions here. However, if anything in one transcription seems funny to you, take a look and see if you’re happier with the other one. And if you think you’ve found something wrong here contact me or post in this forum.

Keith is of course right. What bemuses me rather is that there is such reference to transcriptions from recordings. Surely the evidence of what Jake actually wrote down on paper and was supplied by him to the publishers of Jake’s Progress is enough to be regarded as definitive.
Ian W

[Pam]

In "Jake’s Progress", the lyric book written by Jake Thackray, and illustrated by Bill Tidy (page 88) it’s definitely cocoa………….. (which no doubt was drunk with the Castleford Ladies at some time)

He should know!

[Pam]

Good thing we agree Ian!

[Ian Burdon]

Yes. Ian Watson is correct and as a general rule I would take Jake’s own version as definitive! This saves me from noting that cocoa is aliterative and has similar soporific effects to Kierkegarde and Kant .

However in a spirit of pedantry I ought to note that Jake’s did change some of his lyrics over time and in at least one case – Thomas Haverley – the lyric provided in Jake’s Progress differs from the only recorded version which I’ve heard (on BBC’s Camera and the Song) .

The version of Cenotaph in that programme also differs from that which was later preserved on Radio. The changes might be thought of as the song evolving – although in both cases my personal preference is for the earlier versions: but as with a number of things that probably says more about me than anything else!

Ian

[KeithD]

When retranscribing I actually wanted to capture the words Jake sang on the relevant recording. Of course it’s possible that Jake meant to sing the words that we have in print, but the lyrics are really provided for people who have the recording and want to know what Jake is singing, not what he might possibly have intended to sing.

Where there are two versions, we have transcriptions of both (and I think that’s only for Remember Bethlehem, when surely the live album version suffers from memory lapses, and parts of one other that I’ve forgotten – plus the updated TV version of LBFP).

I tried to get a head start from Jake’s Progress, but I very swiftly doubted that Jake had proof-read the book. Some of the book’s lyrics are just plain stupidly wrong, others are iffy, and the punctuation and line-breaks are undoubtedly not what Jake would have used in a great many cases. I would also like to point out that the lyrics on the record sleeves/liners are not always what Jake sings on the accompanying record. I thought it likely that much had happened between Jake supplying his (probably handwritten) lyrics and their publication, so I preferred to go back to the recordings.

If anyone wants examples of what I mean I’ll dig out a couple tomorrow night.

Turning to differences, what’s on the studio recordings is presumably "definitive" at the time the recordings were made, while there may be some doubt about some songs on the live albums. When we have slightly different versions we can’t know whether Jake intended the change or whether he busked for a while because he’d forgotten a few words. Sometimes we have access to alternative "bootleg" recordings, live or broadcast, and that allows some sort of double-check. But I don’t think it matters; we capture what he sang at a certain time and it is no more than the version he was then singing.

Ian B notes that some songs change over time. In addition to Thomas Haverley I note the extra last stanza in the earliest recording of "Our Dog" on Edmund’s site, which he doesn’t sing on the two later broadcasts. I suspect he dropped it as being too saccharine.

[dmcgovern]

For me the fun is in the words as sung, not as written down on a songsheet. Where Jake sings different words, it’s interesting to speculate what they are, and why he changed them (forgetfulness, indecision, change of heart, political correctness (never!)). So as already said, there is no "definitive" version, only what you think you can hear.

I only transcribed one song (The Kiss) which I did because it was catchy, but also there were several phrases I couldn’t understand, and I determined to work them out. My brain played Chinese Whispers with . . I shall follocking solo munste cision in a smuch, before it finally clicked. The Kiss has some other gems as well.

Sometimes it’s OK not to know all the answers, room for a bit of mystery in there as well . . . Definitely cocoa, though.

David 😉

[Malcy]

I have a recording off the radio of Jake doing "Our Dog" and he sings "You bark at ‘The Archers’, you fart at our parties" which I have always preferred and found funnier – although now, there is a rock band called "The Darkness" and Jake’s original lyric is more topical, again !

p.s. I bet your Jake never did as many variations of any one song as Ian and I have achieved with "I stayed off work today"…

…possibly even when only considering the Jake’s Wake rendition… 😀

[KeithD]

Malcy wrote:

I have a recording off the radio of Jake doing "Our Dog" and he sings "You bark at ‘The Archers’, you fart at our parties"

That’s the one where he listens to the gramophone, too, I think, and memory insists there are a few more minor differences. These are probably deliberate evolutionary changes, on the same level as Big Bad Wotsischangingname.

Any sensible dog would howl at (really: along with) ‘The Darkness’ – as I do, until my son eventually turns them off.

[SJosephine]

Although this is wild speculation, I wonder if there would have been any link in Jake’s mind with the expression, ‘I should cocoa!’ meaning, ‘it’s not likely mate’.

Example: "Will you sell me that guitar for $20?"
"I should cocoa!"

I’ve often heard it abbreviated to just ‘cocoa’ – almost as one might say, ‘Huh!’ or ‘Push off" (I’m being polite here) as a response to a foolish request.

So, taken down the line, it sometimes means, ‘Rubbish!’ or something not worth bothering with (in meaning if not in literal sense).

So did he mean that if he were into all that rubbish with philosophers, he wouldn’t have owt to do with her?

Well, it fills up an idle moment doesn’t it?
:whistle:

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