Slogging For A Pittance

As I was chatting with Joe tonight he pulled a Love and Rockets quote right out of some bodily orifice, without warning.

I was so stunned, I was forced — forced, I say — to go buy a copy of L&R’s “Earth Sun Moon” on the iTunes Music Store.

Ah, mid-80s stoner rock. That I haven’t heard since damn near the mid 80s. (No, I wasn’t a stoner. I missed out on all that drug stuff somehow, despite the hippie demeanor.)

when you had to work so hard,
slogging for a pittance in the boot-and-shoe yard,
that’s when you wanted
what you now give away.

Back then I didn’t have access to Google, so I couldn’t take ten seconds and find out that the Boot and Shoe Yard is a neighborhood in Leeds, England, of which Dr. Robert Baker reported in the mid-19th century:

In one cul-de-sac… there are 34 houses, and in ordinary times, there dwell in these houses 340 persons, or ten to every house; but as these houses are many of them receiving houses for itinerant labourers, during the periods of hay-time and harvest and the fairs, at least twice that number are then here congregated. The name of this place is the Boot and Shoe-yard, in Kirkgate, a location from whence the Commissioners removed, in the days of cholera, 75 cart-loads of manure, which had been untouched for years, and where there now exists a surface of human excrement of very considerable extent, to which these impure and unventilated dwellings are additionally exposed.

An unpleasant place to slog for a pittance indeed.