I remember this song being received with skepticism and a decided lack of enthusiasm by band and producer... someone (I can't remember who) tried to nudge me toward ditching it by saying it resembled something the Mentors might do. If only, and also, yeah, I didn't get that either and still don't. Of course, in the circumstances in which they enountered it (tiny practice room, inadequate PA, inept "chops", and total chaos enveloped by a miasma of defeatism and demoralization) its special un-Mentorsy qualities were no doubt rather hard to spot.
Nevertheless it became one of the more popular tunes and largely set the tone for what was to come in the next few years, song-wise and arguably sound-wise. It's got some pretty nice lines and it performs what I like best in a song fairly well, the feat of taking a dumb or unlikely conceit and making it work by sheer force. I brought in my old pal Dallas Denery to sing some basic backups for the recording. His verdict on the lyrics: something like "far out, daddy-o." Well, they are that. And that cat was dynamite.
I was studying Greek at the time I wrote this and the other "...and the Women Who Love Them" songs while hanging out at a Cole Street cafe in between visits to my father in the hospital, scribbling lyrics in the margins of Plato's Meno and wondering what to do with my life. (The fact that the answer turned out to be "the Mr. T Experience" is as questionable now as it would have been then. What can I say? I wish I had a better life's work, but you work with what you've got and it's the only one I had.)