One of my favorite pop songs is Wreckless Eric's "Take the Cash." But there's a passage in the second verse that I simply couldn't figure out. It starts at a minute into this video.
What was that.."power ring on the dill" "sweetest in the whetties"? For decades I couldn't figure it out. I tried looking it up on the intertubes, but online lyric sites are often unreliable. Here's one example (Spoiler alert: It has mistakes.).
Eventually I had my chance to ask the man himself...I approached Eric at one of his house concerts. He explained it. "It's the sweetness of the readies makes the bell ring on the till."
"OK," I asked, "what does 'readies' mean?"
He told me that it means money. That then reminded me of another song. Dr. Feelgood's "As Long as the Price is Right" uses the word also. At just over half a minute in this video, you can hear the line "If you've got the readies."
And that being a synonym for money made sense in context. Mystery solved!
Of course, now I had another mystery -- why does "readies" mean money? It took me a couple of years, but I finally asked a Brit who was staying with us. Years? Yeah, it was a mystery, but not uppermost in my mind.
So I asked if "readies" is a slang term for pound notes or something.
"Fifty pound notes," he explained. Because they're red.
It all made sense! Reddys! Not readies! So simple...
Now, if only Eric can explain why, at the end of "Take the Cash," he calls it "K.A.S.H."
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