Two Heads Are Better Than One (studio album)
by Bond And Brown

From OldToad 11/14/2019 05:18

All sorts of things going on in this trippy album. One that I happen to know that is worth sharing has to do with the second track, Ig the Pig. This is a Graham Bond lyric, and it's a true story, or so it is said. "Seven scorpions with seven thousand tears/Rose up at sunrise one day/Changed the whammy that you put on us/Put the hoodoo on your beaky ways..."

A 'beak' was Graham Bond's word for managers and others in the music business. A vampire, basically, is how he meant it. IG (name not known, but his initials were IG) was a manager that Bond signed with on the advice of another manager, this was in California when Bond had his time in the States. It was Dr John who let Bond know that IG was bad news, that he was a thug, a small-time gangster with connections. IG tried to muscle Bond into signing a blatantly bad contract: "There's plenty of hippies on the Strip ready to put a knife in your back for $50." So Bond, Dr John, and Johnny Perez of Doug Sahm's band, all of them into various types of occult practice, went out on a balcony and "recited incantations into the night," as the story is told in a book on Bond. The next morning, their scheduled meeting with IG was canceled; turns out IG's wife had been drunk behind the wheel that night as they had been chanting, and she had killed somebody. She was charged with manslaughter. IG was never the same, within a couple of years his office had burned down, he was fired, and he "was last seen working in a bar," as the book tells it.

So the lyrics are basically Graham Bond telling one of his favorite stories about how his magick really worked. "Oh Ig you had it coming, yes you did/We put our hoodoo on you now/Oh, Ig the pig we've been hearing 'bout you/We put our hoodoo on you now/That Iggy's flash office burnt down around his head/His wife got drunk, drove a car and killed somebody dead/Our Lord is a god of vengeance and of war...."