Totally Wired

(1)

I'm totally wired
Totally wired (totally wired)
I'm totally wired (can't you see?) 
Totally wired

Can't you see?
A butterfly stomach round ground (2)
I drank a jar of coffee, and then I took some of these (3)

And I'm totally wired
Totally wired (totally wired)
I'm totally wired (can't you see?)
Totally wired

Life leaves you surprised.
Slaps you in the eyes.
If I was a communist, a rich man would bail me (4)
The opposite applies.
The morning light.
Another fresh fight.
Another row, right, right, right, right.
 

And I'm totally wired
Just totally wired (totally wired) (5)
I'm totally biased
Totally wired
You don't have to be weird to be wired

You don't have to be an American brand
You don't have to be strange to be strange
You don't have to be weird to be weird (6)
 

But I'm totally wired totally wired (totally wired)
I'm totally wired (can't you see?) 
Totally wired

My heart and I agree
My heart and I agree (7)
I'm irate, peeved, irate, peeved,
Irate, bad state
Bad state.

I'm totally wired totally wired (totally wired)
I'm totally wired (can't you see?) 
Totally wired
 

And I'm always worried
And I'm always worried
And I'm always worried
And I'm always worried (8)

1. This is a pretty straightforward song by Fall standards, and may be the only time Mark E. Smith has expressed chagrin at a song not becoming a hit (from Reformation):

MES in an interview with Adrian Deevoy in International Musician and Recording World (May 1983): "I know Totally Wired was a good song. I wrote the drum beat and the chorus and they were very accessible and very catchy. I knew it was commercial and it should have been number one but it wasn't so what can you do? I'm not going to degrade myself and do smoother and smoother Totally Wireds which is what people are doing, man, and don't tell me that's not true." 

On the other hand, it is very bass-heavy by pop standards. 

Dan submits:

In 2018, for Marc Riley's BBC 6 Music show, Peter Hook and The Light covered this song as a tribute to MES.

When the performance was reposted to the "Mark E Smith & The Fall: It's Not Repetition, It's Discipline" Facebook page on 24 January 2020, Julia Adamson replied with this:

MES told

Julia AdamsonMES told me this was his least favourite Fall song, he hated singing it.

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2. Dan reminds us that "ground round" is a kind of ground beef. The idiom "butterflies in the stomach" refers to a case of nerves.

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3. "These" apparently refers to some kind of speed.

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4. Jon in the comments suggests that this may refer to Friedrich Engels' financial support of Karl Marx. Engels ran his father's factory in Manchester, and thus the demise of the bourgeoisie was plotted with the help of surplus value milked from the proletariat...now I'm going to find an animal rights demo so I can accuse everyone of wearing leather shoes.

In any case, Dan has found something that seems like a more direct source for this puzzling line:

Frederick Vanderbilt Field was an American millionaire [Vanderbilt!] and left wing civil rights activist who was trustee and secretary of the Civil Rights Congress bail fund.
 

Field refused to reveal who had put up bond for eight Communist Party officials, who had jumped bail and disappeared after being convicted by the Truman administration Department of Justice for violations of the Smith Act. Convicted of contempt of court since he would not provide the names of any of his Communist friends, Field served two months of a 90-day sentence in federal prison at Ashland, Kentucky, in 1951.

^

5. One popular account of why Roger Daltrey stuttered on "My Generation" is that he was trying to sound like a speedfreak, although this may not be true. In any case, since this is a song about speed with a stuttering vocal, and since that story, whether true or not, is a very well-known one, MES's stutter is either an intentional allusion or a notable coincidence.  

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6. A Part of America, Therein:

You don't have to be weird to be wired
?You don't have to be a died hair punk funk shit-hot fucked up tick-tock pad
?You don't have to be strange to be strangled
?When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro

This last line (which strikes me as a bit corny by Fall standards) is a quote from Hunter S. Thompson, a writer for whom MES has expressed appreciation, and who is the subject of "Midnight in Aspen."

Dan provides the details:

For the sake of completeness, it comes from "Fear and Loathing at the Superbowl" (Rolling Stone #155, 28 Feb 1974, reprinted in The Great Shark Hunt (originally Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1: The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time), first published in 1979.



In context: 
 

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

Who said that?

I suspect it was somebody from the Columbia Journalism Review, but I have no proof ... and it makes no difference anyway.
 

"You don't have to be weird to be wired" is a variant of the lyric above, a quote of Captain Beefheart, who, in a 1973 interview, gives a pretty good account of the "New Puritan" ethic (capitalization as in original):

"i write a hundred and fifty pages a day. today i only did thirty." "how do you do all that and work?", i ask. "wórk?", he says flinching, "it's all play.... some people think it's a terrible thing being a human being," he says ... "but you don't have to be weird to be weird."
 

According to The Jukebox Rebel, "Beefheart's 1973 interview phrase 'you don't have to be weird to be weird' was used as the caption in press adverts for his Unconditionally Guaranteed LP in 1974, aside the image of the Captain clutching two fistfuls of dollars. The chances seem high that MES would have picked up on this via the Melody Maker or such like."

I have no idea what a "tick-tock pad" (or tic-tock pad?) might be. Dan points out that there is a character in there is a character in L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz books named Tik Tok. He also mentions that this reminds him of an electronic drum pad, which is worth considering. A reader suggests it may be a time sheet used at a place of employment.

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7. This line may be a quote from Ornette Coleman's "All My Life" (1975, composed by Coleman and sung by Asha Puthli), which is sung to the same melody in the original song. However, the latter in turn quotes "Stella by Starlight," a jazz song by Victor Young for which Ned Washington wrote lyrics in 1946, which include the lines "My heart and I agree/She's everything on this earth to me."

^

8. The concern here with drug-induced or drug-enhanced stress and fear is reminiscent of "Frightened," from Live at the WItch Trials.

^

Totally Wired: Fall Tracks A-Z