Lost Gem: "Homeless Brother" - Don McLean (1974)

"Smash your bottle on the gravestone...
and live while you can."
~ Don McLean ~


One of the more neglected albums from the seventies..."Homeless Brother" (1974) was from our Americana troubadour...Don McLean.

Filled with beautiful and catchy songs that sound like they've been around forever...McLean sings of the spirit in every man.

Don McLean is a genuine McTreasure.

Lost Gem:--> "Homeless Brother"...This mid-tempo folk gem flows effortlessly from verse to verse with McLean throwing out one great observation after another like candy at a Shriner's parade.

All the more relevant today...and one can't help but feel the chill of knowing..."there, but for the grace...".  A classic.

Have you heard this one?


I was walking by the graveyard, late last Friday night
I heard somebody yelling, it sounded like a fight
It was just a drunken hobo dancing circles in the night
Pouring whiskey on the headstones in the blue moonlight
So often have I wondered where these homeless brothers go
Down in some hidden valley where their sorrows cannot show,
Where the police cannot find them, where the wanted man can go
There's freedom when your walking, even though you're walking slow
Smash your bottle on the gravestone and live while you can
That homeless brother is my friend.

It's hard to be a pack rat, it's hard to be a 'bo
But living's so much harder where the heartless people go
Somewhere the dogs are barking and the children seem to know
That Jesus on the highway was a lost hobo
And they hear the holy silence of the temples in the hill
And they see the ragged tatters as another kind of frill
And they envy him the sunshine and they pity him the chill
And they're sad to do their living for some other kind of thrill
Smash your bottle on the gravestone and live while you can
That homeless brother is my friend.

Somewhere there was a woman, somewhere there was a child
Somewhere there was a cottage where the marigolds grew wild
But somewhere is just like nowhere when you leave it for a while
You'll find the broken-hearted when you're traveling jungle-style
Down the bowels of a broken land where numbers live like men
Where those who keep their senses have them taken back again
Where the night stick cracks with crazy rage, where madmen don't
pretend
Where wealth has no beginning and poverty no end
Smash your bottle on the gravestone and live while you can
That homeless brother is my friend.

The ghosts of highway royalty have vanished in the night
The Whitman wanderer walking t'ward a glowing inner light
The children have grown older and the cops have gripped us tight
There's no spot round the melting pot for free men in their flight
And you who live on promises and prosper as you please
The victim of your riches often dies of your disease
He can't hear the factory whistle, just the lonesome freight train's
wheeze
He's living on good fortune, he ain't dying on his knees
Smash your bottle on the gravestone and live while you can
That homeless brother is my friend.
That homeless brother is my friend.

Good stuff!

Casey Chambers
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