One of the more memorable quotes from the early 1970s. I wasn’t much interested in Traffic so I paid it scant attention. But WTF does it mean to you? I was surprised to see that Micheal J. Pollard wrote the phrase and that does seem to fit into my impressions of Pollard as somewhat odd.
Internet searches turn up all kinds of meanings. Back then I thought it was an oblique reference to gay men but most writers don’t seem to go that direction. I suppose, given that it came from Pollard brainstorming ideas, that it is just another vapid phrase we have spent decades trying to figure out.
Yeah, I’ve heard that it came from Michael J. Pollard. My impression was that it was just a nonsense phrase, one of those things that might pop into your head at random, possibly when you’re half asleep or whatever, or maybe when you mishear something on TV. And then you remember it because you think it sounds cool.
I would guess it originates from something in Pollard’s head that might be interesting if there were some way to find out about it. But as an intentional artistic statement, it never occurred to me that it was actually supposed to convey any kind of meaning.
I, too, thought it was a reference to gay men, and didn’t know about the connection to Pollard, but when I went to remind myself of the lyrics, I found this post here:
Here’s the thing. Winwood was 16 or 17 yrs. old when he wrote this.
In those days, street slang for heroin was ‘boy’ and for cocaine was ‘girl’.
High heel boy refers to a mixture of heroin and coke, commonly called a speedball.
The ‘low spark’ is a description of the physical feeling brought on by injecting the speedball.
The man in the suit is the dealer, making profits on the dreams of his customers.
The gun that didn’t make any noise is simply a hypodermic syringe.
This is one of the most truly savage songs in history, way deeper than nearly anything else from its era.
How Stevie knew this stuff at such a young age is an interesting question at such a young age is a good question
So this writer also didn’t know about the connection to Pollard, and I’m mildly skeptical of the drug references – somewhere, sometime, any given word was probably street slang for any given drug – but it has a rather satisfying self-consistency. The gun = needle thing seems particularly suggestive that it is about drugs in some way, even if not exactly as described.
I grew up in that era, listening to that song, starting my journey into my own addiction. I always thought it was about drugs, especially after seeing the needle and the damage done firsthand.
Huh. My thought about that has always been that he’s a record industry executive screwing the artists over.
I mean, I’ve never thought about the lyrics enough to analyze the whole piece of work as something with a cohesive meaning, but that’s what I’ve gotten from that line.
I’ll admit that LSOTHHB was not a song I gave much thought to, but the lyrics of so many songs I listened to back then were either so deep, or so poetical, or so beyond my personal experience, or so nonsensical, or some combination of the above, that I often didn’t even try to understand them, but just let them flow over and around me and ooze into whatever cracks in my consciousness they could find.
I’ve often been surprised to learn about real, or at least alternative, meanings to songs I’ve known for decades. We have a whole thread for that experience.
Last day of school in (I think) my junior year in high school our English teacher brought the record in, played the song and we spent the class period discussing what we thought it might be about. Consensus was “drugs.” This would have been around 74-75 or so.
Winwood was 23 when he wrote the song and had been a rock star for seven years. I doubt he was all that naive. Further, Jim Capaldi, who wrote the lyrics, was 27.
Capaldi has explained what he meant by it:
Blockquote Pollard and I would sit around writing lyrics all day, talking about Bob Dylan and The Band, thinking up ridiculous plots for the movie. Before I left Morocco, Pollard wrote in my book ‘The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys’. For me, it summed him up. He had this tremendous rebel attitude. He walked around in his cowboy boots, his leather jacket. At the time he was a heavy little dude. It seemed to sum up all the people of that generation who were just rebels. The ‘Low Spark’, for me, was the spirit, high-spirited. You know, standing on a street corner. The low rider. The ‘Low Spark’ meaning that strong undercurrent at the street level.[3]
So Capaldi saw it was the younger generation whose attitude was unfathomable by the older generation. Given that, the lyrics are quite clear overall.
(Yeah, I should know, and I could google it, and I should NOT get the actor’s name stuck in my brain as Blockquote Pollard…)
By the way, we obsessed over lyrics back in the day, having deeeep discussions of Dylan, Lennon, Zappa, T.Rex, and Floyd (do NOT try to figure out a Syd Barrett song) and I always pictured those ‘poets’ just laughing: “You’re looking for meaning in THAT? It just sounded cool…”
Actually, Dylan made fun of all of us:
You’re probably wondering by now Just what this song is all about? What’s probably got you baffled more What this thing here is for… (guitar riff)
Isaac Asimov once wrote about attending a lecture by a professor who was analyzing Ike’s writings and discussing what he meant in certain stories. When Ike stood up and identified himself as the author, declaiming that what the prof said wasn’t what he meant, the prof reportedly replied “well, why would you necessarily know just what meaning you were writing about?”
I still have my copies of “In memory yet green” & “with joy still felt”, his first two volumes of autobiography. That’s where I first encountered the tale. I should reread 'em sometime.
It’s a song about rebellion. Read as a poem, there are obvious synecdoches. It’s the young vs. the old in power in the context of 60s/70s struggle against conformity. The man in the suit is The Man. The drug and record company explanations are the prevailing explanations, but the key to the song is “spirit is something no one destroys.” I listened to this as a teen at a time when we were protesting the Vietnam War–and more.
Most importantly because a work of art is incomplete when it leaves the artist; the completion occurs in the mind of the receiver, who brings their own experience, perspectives, and filters to the process. If that is an interpretation other than the artist’s stated intent? Too bad. The art is in the world now, no longer just in their mind.
An artist also sometimes imposes meaning consciously after the fact on what was produced, but the mind under the hood may have had a different agenda, or been reacting to a more abstract set of thoughts and feelings that an artist is unaware of.
If a listener like @SwedenLTR2025 found those themes in the song and that had meaning for them in that time and place, it doesn’t matter if the artist hadn’t consciously meant that.
Oh, no disagreement on that from me. I’m a fan of the Johari window concept, with one of the 4 window panes being things that others can see/understand/know about us that we don’t perceive about ourselves.
One of the all-encompassing British fashions in the 60s were low boots with heels, variously called Beatle boots, Chelsea boots, or Cuban heels. American reporters made fun of the high heels, just as they did the long hair, but the boots were just modified versions of cowboy boots. I’ve always thought that those boots were what was being referenced in the song.
Jim Capaldi wrote all the lyrics, and he was 27 at the time. We have to believe that he got the line from Pollard, although cowboy boots would reinforce an image that young Brits would be very aware of. The movie they were taking part in was never filmed.
You can turn anything into meaning drugs, but when I read all the lyrics and not just cherrypick one line it’s clear to me that he was talking about the disillusionments of the music industry. A needle as a gun that doesn’t make noise is a great image, but the next line specifically mentions a bullet. And it’s the man in the suit who’s shot dead, so it’s clearly a metaphorical shooting, not from drugs.
"And of course I couldn’t answer that question because it suddenly became clear to me that there might well be more in a story than an author was aware of.
Dr. Guenther and I became good friends after that, and on October 17 I gave a guest lecture to his class."
