I agree, but I wonder whether there could also be a reference there to Phineas Gage, who actually did get a spike right through his head, and went from being a rather serious person to someone who just didn’t give a shit. I don’t know how The Stones might have learned about Gage, but it is not impossible. The “spike right through my head” is a little odd and specific as a general metaphor for being down.
Perhaps people today find the lyric confusing because they are not familiar with the expression “it’s a gas,” whose meaning (not to say derivation) is far from obvious.
Lots of good interpretations for Lido Shuffle’s meaning. I personally think Boz Scaggs wrote this song with multiple meanings and innuendos through out. On the More obvious side of things, he is singing about a gambler; which has been prominently stated. but otherwise subtly i feel it’s a drug song about getting drunk and high. REASONS: 1)Lido missed the boat- mind frame reference- and he ain’t coming back- he’s at the point of no return in this lifestyle (possible stretch here i know, but keep reading).
2)handle off the top- liquor from the top shelf, likely moonshine if you look into ‘Jukejoint bars’ from the slavery days in southern US
3)next stop Chi-town- slanted eyes from getting stoned. -Lido put the money down and let ‘em roll- meaning pay the man for the bag o’ green and roll me a dube
4) One more job oughtta get it - the big score so they can afford some Blow
5)Chorus- time passing and he is stating to live the big life. He found coke and a woman
6)Toe the line or blow it and that was all she wrote- she took all his stuff, but left him one line of coke and a brief message.
7) He be making like a beeline headin for the boarderline going for broke- i infer that she ratted him out to the cops during point #6 and left specifically those 2 things out of remorse; warning of the cops and a little ‘bump’ to feel better about the situation
8) one more hit oughtta do it, this joint ain’t nothing to it- you don’t feel stoned when your high on coke but he’s gonna enjoy the last toke carefreely cause he’s now broke and going to Mexico.
I hope I have helped you to see the song in a positive new light, CalMeacham, without offending anyone.
I don’t know that Lido’s being told to pay up or blow by some criminal element. The reputation of most gangsters is that if you don’t pay up, you die. They don’t say give up the green or beat it.
I’m thinking it was law enforcement that told Lido to toe the line or blow.
I figure the “Toe the line or blow” note was from his girlfriend. She’s tired of putting up with Lido’s criminal lifestyle and she’s telling him to go straight or get out of her life.
An artistic rendering with only one explicit meaning has missed the boat.
Scaggs and Paich are true artists, and that’s all she wrote.
This song conveys meaning on several levels and it’s a delight to connect the multi-colored dots from the minds of many posters. On the other hand, repeat insistence on a one-dimensional interpretation stirs the soul about as much as an engineering drawing of the single shiny nail it suggests.
I’ll do what my subject says and add my own take later. Broke a couple of wrist bones last week and typing is a tedious task right now. Boz said the song was structured after “The Fat Man” by Fats Domino.
A buddy of mine is a musician. He has written lyrics for many songs. I once asked what a particular song’s lyrics meant and he explained the details of an event that happened to him in his youth.
When I pointed out that nobody could possibly know these details he shrugged his shoulders. To him, lyrics are poetry he has written. Whether his audience understands his words or finds their own meaning in them is irrelevant to him. Just an observation.
And a good one. When the facets of real human experiences are submerged in a song or painting or poem they leave traces that other humans can sense without conscious awareness. Contemplated long or frequently they will produce resonances in the observer of a kindred nature that can lead to discovery of what truly lies beneath, or construction of alternate realities, or simple enjoyment of the distant subliminally felt familiar. Soul touching soul.
A funny connection I just made, figured it was worth posting: Lido Shuffle 1977 … but in 1969, CCR on Bad Moon Rising has Lodi. (a song about a struggling musician is stuck without money in the small town of Lodi) i wonder if Boz was a Creedence fan
I figured Lido Shuffle was just another of thousands of dance craze tunes like Peppermint Twist. And I have a vague recollection of some famous place (possibly a night club?) named The Lido.
Clearly, I paid no attention at all to the actual lyrics.
Boz Scaggs wrote this song with David Paich. In an 2013 interview with Scaggs, he talked about how the song came about: “‘Lido’ was a song that I’d been banging around. And I kind of stole… well, I didn’t steal anything. I just took the idea of the shuffle. There was a song that Fats Domino did called ‘The Fat Man’ that had a kind of driving shuffle beat that I used to play on the piano, and I just started kind of singing along with it. Then I showed it to Paich and he helped me fill it out. It ended up being ‘Lido Shuffle.’”
Lido, the man in the song, was named such to rhyme with the ‘whoa-oh-uh-oh’ hook.
Unfortunately the brief interview was only with Boz so we don’t know David’s thoughts…
The handle is the money won by the house in gambling. It could be the take at the track, or the net at a casino, or the money from slot machines or numbers games around town. Richard Stark (Donald Westlake) titled a book The Handle, in which Parker is hired to steal the winnings from a casino.
If Lido took the handle off the top, he probably stole the money before it could get to the home office of the gangsters running the operation. That would put him on the run to someplace like Chicago where he wasn’t known.
The rest of the song implies that he was doing good there, but he got found out and told either the square himself with the gang or leave in a hurry, permanently, to go to Mexico and hide out there, a common destination for guys dodging the law or the mob.
I never found the song to be obscure, but I read a lot of hard-boiled stuff from the pre-war era that uses the same slang and the same situations. The lyrics fall into place then.
Except for tombstone bar and jukejoint car.
In 1940 bandleader Harry Rosenthal was cited in a gossip column as making plans for his new tombstone bar. Sounds promising, but a later article clarified that it wasn’t a *type *of bar but merely one to be named the Tombstone Bar after the notorious city.
I can’t find any reference to jukejoint car outside of the song. A jukejoint was a rowdy bar. Juke had two meanings. It seems to derive from a Gullah term meaning wicked or disorderly, so became used for a dive bar, especially one that had a jukebox to provide music rather than a live band. Could one have been in a disused railroad car as astro suggested? Maybe. If it was where the illegal gambling in town took place, it would have a stealable handle. But I’ve never heard the term.
Was the bar a gambling den in Arizona situated in a railroad car? If so, everything else follows.
One more resurrection of this zombie thread oughta get it.
Anyhow, I pretty much agree with astro back in post 29. He “got the note” not because he owed money, but because he was winning too much, and the House said “you’re done now.” The “borderline” could just be the Chicago city limits; he’s getting out of town to find the next game.
Lido is a resort beach on an island in Venice. Subsequent uses all originate from there. When I first heard the song I honestly guessed it was about partying in Venice with the Eurotrash.
Shuffle is the song’s rhythm (this one is a sped-up example). That fact has already been well covered here.
I couldn’t tell you what the song is “really” about, you’d have to ask Skaggs; but this what I’ve always taken it for:
A “shuffle” is a kind of song/dance, proto-typically African-American. So as I see it the song about some rural African-American back in the time of the Great Migration who decides working as a sharecropper is for chumps, and moves to the big city to live the good life as a street hustler. It’s the sort of story that might have been commemorated in song in a Harlem jazz club at the time.