Tax Free - Joni Mitchell

Front rooms

Back rooms

Slide into tables

Crowd into bathrooms

Joke around

Cheap talk

Deep talk

Talk, talk, talk around the clock

Crawl home

Lie down

Teeth chatter

Heart pounds

I don’t feel so good

I don’t feel so good

Push a button to escape

Preacher on the tube crying «Lord!»

There’s evil in this land

Rock and roll music!

«Cast down these dope-fiends

And there noisy bands!»

Damn their souls!

Preacher preaching love like vengeance

Preaching love like hate

Calling for large donations

Promising estates

Rolling lawns and angel bands

Behind the pearly gates

You know, he will have his in this life

But yours will have to wait

He’s immaculately tax free

Multiple hundreds of thousands of

Tax free

Hundreds of millions of dollars

Tax free

A hundred billion dollars!

And who is paying the price?

Who, who

Your children are

Pissed off

Jacked up

Scream into the mic

Spit into the loving cup

Strut like a rooster

March like a man

God’s hired hands and the devil bands

Packing the same grandstands

Different clothes (pot in their pockets!)

Different hair (sexually active!)

Raise a screaming guitar or a bible in the air

Theatre of anguish

Theatre of glory

God’s hired hands and the devil bands

Oh come let us adore me!

Lord, there’s danger in this land

You get witch hunts and wars

When church and state hold hands

(Fuck it!)

Tonight I’m going dancing

With the drag queens and the punks

Big beat deliver me

From this sanctimonious skunk

We’re no flaming angels

And he’s not heaven sent

How can he speak for the Prince of Peace

When he’s hawk-right militant

And he’s immaculately tax free

Our nation has lost its guts!

Save me

Our nation has lost its strength

Tax free

Our nation has whimpered and cried

Save me

And petted the Castros

Tax free

The Khomeinis' and the Kaddafis'

Save me

For so long

Tax free

That we don’t know how to act like a man

Save me

I think that we should turn the United States Marines

Loose on that little island south of Florida and

Stop that problem!

I am preachin' love, I am!