Cannon Raps (Pt. 2 / Live from the Troubadour, Los Angeles, CA/1972)

Lyrics

[Skit] We feel that we have a responsibility to Shine light into the darkness, you know? See, you know, there's a lotta darkness out here We watch it all the time I'm busy lookin' at the darkness sayin', "Damn, There's some darkness over there," you know? (Right on!) Haha, whatever, and we have a responsibility to focus on it, see You know, y'all be cool We know that we know how to make some music And the music ain't supposed to stand still And little bit of, w—what do you call it? Little bits of in-roads Into some music ain't enough That we have a sеrious responsibility to do it anyhow But we prefеr to think about the responsibilities we have to the music And the music is all-consuming, I wanna tell you It's tyrannical Now, we found out some time ago That if you take a whole group of really super bad dudes And hang 'em in together, they'll make some music Whether or not somebody else thought it was hip or not, you know It'd be okay You dig? Somebody's gotta start it And we – Mike Deasy, Ernie Watts, And Roy McCurdy, Walter Booker, George Duke And Airto Moreira, along with my brother, Nat, and me We figured that we can make some music just by doin' it And, it's very easy to make music if you start out with musicians {*crowd laughter*} So—so we're going to—yeah We're going to, um, begin to do something that is comprehensive By establishing some kind of musical premise And it will develop, you know Everybody'll make his own statement, according to Hoyle, or whatever We're going to start this particular thing with Walter Booker, our bassist And Ernie Watts, our tenor saxophonist, or flautist, Or whatever he wants to do I think he likes to play the saxophone sometimes, you know, He's—he's good so, you know what I mean? What the hell Anyhow, the statement that they make Will determine what everybody else plays very shortly, ya dig? And that's the way it goes