Pulling Teeth

I just recently started getting into this old, old cassette by the group Green Day, a group I never really gave much attention to before. I think this is because when I first heard of them, from a former co-worker, something about the name put me off. It's like something down inside said, "Oh, probably a bunch of radical environmental whackos. The kind that gives reasonable and thoughtfully progressive environmentalists a bad name. I think I associated them witht he group "Greenpeace", in a sense. Yeah, folks, you can only guess at the snakes I've got crawling around in my head.

Anyway, years later, I'm at this old antique mall, and see this cassette by the aforementioned Green Day-for a dollar. I remembered my former co-workers rantings about the group, and figured, hell, they have to be worth a dollar. And so I brought the cassette, entitled "Dookie". As soon as I got home, I put it on the shelf, where it promptly began to collect roughly one sixteenth of a inch of dust over thecourse of the following year.

I almost completely forgot about it until the group happenned to be featured on I think it was the Tonight Show, and I thought, hell, they are good. In fact-hell, they are damned good. Then, it hit me. This is the group that was in that old soft drink commercial, Pepsi or Coca-Cola one, I don't remember. The kid was in the mosh pit, where to his surprise his pop is there cheering on the band, and the kid looks on in shock and mounting horror as he realizes his mom too is somewhere in the mix, cheering on Green day, as they sing some song about masturbating. I remember all this becuase I always wondered how it was that that commerical was even allowed to air, let alone that it lasted so long. It was finally removed, probably after somebody like Jerry Falwell or James Dobson was told by one of his or their younger and formerly hipper parishioners exactly what the lead singer was singing in this soft drink televsion commercial.

Laer on, I retrieved that tape, wondering if the song on the commecial was on the tape I had purchased, which luckily turned out to have been in good shape. I went through the first side, and I think what was on the commercial might have been from the song "Longview", buit I'm not sure. What was improtant was that eventually I happenned onto one of the best songs of all time, it seemed at the time, and easily the best song of all that I have yet heard from Green Day. It's a song called,. as a Green Day fan might have probably figured out by the title of the post, "Pulling Teeth".

I don't know if this song was ever a hit from the group or not, but if it wasn't it definitely should have been. Maybe if they extended it by repeating the middle eight and adding a verse, it could even be one of the biggest hits of all time, or at least the year they release it as a hit.

To understand what the song is about, which it took me some time to do, think of the book "Misery" by Stephen King, which may well be what the song is based on for all I know.

"I'm all busted up, broken bones and nasty cuts
Accidents will happen-"

Only it turns out it's not an accident, his girlfriend has put him in this shape and now has him imprisoned, seemingly totally at his mercy, so he has to pretend his love is true. In the meantime, he looks out his window hoping someone will pass by-but no one knows.

Now I guess by now you're thinking those snakes in my head are slithering ovvertimer for me to be so hung up on something like this, but you have to know Green Day. This is a song you want to dance to, in pure Pete Townshend fashion, bouncing around the dance floor like a rag doll with a life of it's own. If you were with your woman, but you wanted to be with somebody else, and you were around both of them at a karaoke bar, this is the kind of song you would sing to the girl you wanted to be with while you were wearing dark sun glasses in the smoke-filled crowded dark bar, and you were staring right at her the whole time. Yeah, the snakes have now bitten.

Anyway, "Pulling Teeth" is now up there in my group of all time favorite songs, easily in the top one hundred, at least for now, until I wear it out. Which I might well do. Since I got so hung up on this one, I can't get past it on the cassette, not even for the one that follows, which I recognize as a tune that gets frequent FM airplay.

No, I don't have the fucking time to listen to you whine. But it only takes a few seconds to hit the rewind button.