March 31, 2020
“Too Much Month at the End of the Money” and the Worker Bees of Social Wealth
I had been working as a typesetter at RADIO & RECORDS for four years and feeling stuck at my job like many working people in a situation that didn’t pay enough. I was 42 years old, and this was the first job I’d ever had on which I had lasted more than three years. Oh, I had been making money as a typesetter since the beginning of that decade, but when I started out at The Argonaut, under David Asper Johnson, just as it moved from Marina del Rey to Hermosa Beach, I had no idea that the profession would still find me at the keyboard on the other end of that decade’s insidious pendulum.
One of my tasks at Radio & Records was to put the finishing touches on music charts, and one day the Country Music chart had a title that summed it up: “Too Much Month at the End of the Money.” Country music was not the preferred genre of my fellow employees, so I never did hear the song itself, written and recorded by members of the Billy Hill band until just now, when my search engine tracked it down. Marty Stuart covered the song in 2003, but I much prefer the first version:
I thought of that song this morning because for millions of my fellow citizens the story in this song is about to double down. In the spirit of “Murder Most Foul,” I would suggest adding the following couplet:
When the rich start running out of money;
Play them “Got No Bees, Got No Honey.”
If the second line suggests a Marxist critique, then I’m glad you caught the drift.
About Bill Mohr