What’s fuzzy on the outside and juicy on the inside?
It was rumored that the Allman Brothers album *Eat a Peach * was called that because the truck involved in the accident which killed Duane Allman was carrying peaches. A source informs that the phrase “eat a peach” actually comes from an interview where Allman said that his anti-Vietnam-War efforts consisted of eating a peach when he came back to Georgia. What did that mean? Is it a free-love expression of the sixties?
T.S.Eliot had Prufrock ask himself “Do I dare to eat a peach?” What is so daring about that? Was he asking if he dared to go down on a prostitute?
What gives? Have I lived a life of debauchery and failed to learn the lingo? Or, bad pun alert, the “cunnilingo”?
A google search for “eat peach cunnilingus” turned up enough hits to convince me some people use the term “eat the peach” for cunnilingus. I have no idea about the Allman brothers.
I doubt very much Prufock was referring to this. Although the poem does talk about his fear of intimacy with the woman he is going to have tea with, cunnilingus would seem very out of character. I think he’s just talking about the dangers of excessive caution; measuring life out with coffee spoons (not a metaphor for masturbation) and the hazards of parting your hair behind (not a metaphor for anal sex). Not at all like that James character from Roald Dahl.
Having also led a life of debauchery, I can assure you that “Eat a Peach” certainly was occcassionally slang for cunnilingus after the Allman Brother’s album. I’ve researched the other theories a time or two over the years, because the old friend who introduced me to them in 1978 [a strong partisan of the cunnilingus theory], goaded me into it.
At the time, I believed the title was associated to either a Serbo-Croatian or Chinese proverb (I was oddly opedantic) neither of which I recall clearly now (the Chinese was along the lines of “Eat a peach and live forever”) I liked the racier theory I never found any support for it. I was a grade schooler in Georgia -too young to have heard it used as a saucy phrase- when the album came out, but I heard the cunnilingus interpretation far more often in Boston than Atlanta in the late 70’s and early 80s.
In reagards the album cover/death theory: Supposedly, Duane Allman had died in a crash with a peach truck and Berry Oakley had hit a watermelon truck, both pictured on the cover. However, according to the book Midnight Riders Allman ran off the road avoiding a flatbed carrying a lumber crane, and Oakley hit a bus - nine months after the album came out.
Snopes has the relevant citations and quotes, including the Greg Allman interrview:“Every time I’m in Georgia, I eat a peach for peace.” I can easily see it being a cunnilingus reference in the “Make Love, not War” era, but as I said, I don’t recall hearing it much in Georgia, even years later,
Then again, we Southerners admire a turn of a phrase. At least in my circles, excessively recycling a bon mot wasn’t witty; it was slightly pathetic.
I know of a reference that isn’t from the Allman Brothers, but another Georgia band, Jupiter Coyote. In the song “Amorous” from Lucky Day, they have the line:
*I wanna shake you down
eat you alive
like a smooth, sweet peach
watch your clothes
fall to the floor
baby, I’ve waited so long*
Good song, and it seems to confirm your suspicions w/re to the meaning.
Ah, food/sex metaphors… FWIW, Poi Dog Pondering’s “Diamonds and Buttermilk” uses the whole fruit salad: “I’m gonna suck your guava juice/get down on my knees and sniff in your passion fruit…”. The song goes on to reference kiwis and pomegranates, too. No peaches, though.
More or less contemporaneously, Steve Miller was singing “Really like your peaches, wanna shake your tree.” But I’m pretty sure that these peaches are somewhat northward of the other peach in question.
I believe the quote from “Prufrock” comes towards the end of the poem when J. Alfred has aged, and the question “Do I dare to eat a peach?” refers to his potential problems digesting it. I know an old man’s fruit-related diarrhea is a lot less sexy than Greg Allman performing oral sex, but – or, wait, is it…
–the angry hornet
ps i’m quite glad that my first post under this sn contains the phrase “old man’s fruit-related diarrhea.”
I am unaware of any Chinese proverbs that runs like this. However, part of the story in the book Journey to the West was about how the Monkey King ate all the peaches from a tree in the Celestial Court.
Just curious. If Prufrock was worried about the dangers of excessive caution, what is so daring about eating a peach? I must say that I always have taken the quote to mean that. If so, it just seems Eliot might have chosen a better metaphor.
There’s a similar reference in Wild At Heart, which makes it even more obvious that the speaker is referring to cunnilingus. Oddly enough, Wild At Heart is also a Nicolas Cage movie. Maybe it’s a favorite term of his, or something.
