Afternoon Matinee: Protest - Metal Drums

Performed by Patty Larkin

From the time he was a kid, Mark O'Donnell and his buddies would

Play in the pasture

Out behind his neighborhood there were acres of vacant land

And they played as only children can

Ooh, in the pasture

Out in the long tall grass, metal drums were lying in the broken glass

The kids would play with the stuff inside of them

They'd crawl in and roll around, end up spinning around on the open ground

Ooh, of the pasture

Ooh, they were playing with the metal drums

Aah, banging on the metal drums

Ooh, beat that metal drum a little faster

In the town of Holbrook, Mass, you're lucky if you got the chance

Working a good job, making a few bucks

And it's Baird and McClair, they run that chemical plant down there

Ooh, by the pasture

Joanne O'Donnell had five kids and all but one of her kids got sick

She was hard pressed for answers

And on the other side of town, there was a street where all the doctors found

Every other woman died of cancer

News broke like a lightning bolt across a red-hot sky

In the blue T.V. light Joanne O'Donnell cried

Seemed like the kiss of death

Hung in the air when a whole town found out

They'd been poisoned for years

The environmental plan put the site on the list of the big top ten

To the tune of sixty-three million

Thanks to the women and the wives, there's a chain link fence up eight feet high

But that won't bring back their children

As for Baird and McClair, all the soil from the ground to the bedrock down there

Was ruined by the bastards

Thanks to the corporate kind, they protected their assets - they're doing fine

Too bad about the Holbrook disaster

Beat that metal drum a little faster now, beat that metal drum now

Beat that metal drum now, beat that metal drum

~ from Lyric Wiki ~