Dollars and Cents

the can thing

Nobody sat down and wrote “Dollars and Cents”. It began as a long improvisation, the five of them playing with no plan, and it became a song afterwards, when the tape was cut up. Thom Yorke told Nick Kent at Mojo it had been ten minutes of the band mucking about, trying to do “the Can thing”; Simon Reynolds, writing it up for The Wire the same summer, had it at eleven.

The Can thing was a method as much as a sound, record for as long as it takes and then edit, and Yorke named the man he took it from, Holger Czukay, who produced Can. He did not pretend the raw jam was any good.

It was incredibly boring, but it's that Holger thing of chop-chop-chop.

thom yorke · the wire, july 2001

Colin Greenwood gave the same account to The Georgia Straight in Vancouver in June 2001, a live jam and then a live jam that had been cut up. Ed O'Brien's diary catches it half-built. On a slow Monday at the end of January 2000 the tape machine in the main room broke down, and in the other room the song gained percussion and a guitar part.

strings by way of alice coltrane

The orchestra got in through Colin's record collection. He brought in an Alice Coltrane album with strings and played it over the band's take, and they kept turning themselves down and her up until she was all they could hear. Jonny Greenwood told JazzTimes what he was after, the harp Alice Coltrane plays on Journey in Satchidananda and Ptah, the El Daoud. They had no harp, and Jonny does not play double bass, so he stuck strips of electrical tape on a double bass's neck where his notes were and played it that way.

He then wrote the strings in something like her style for the Orchestra of St John's, recorded in Dorchester Abbey, the 12th-century church near the band's studio. Yorke told Reynolds they were there to lend the track some authority. By the end they are louder than he is.

after the song, the wto

It was on stage a year before Amnesiac came out, first at the Théâtre Antique in Arles on 13 June 2000, four months before even Kid A. When it was left off Kid A that July, NME called it the band's most political statement yet. It was a regular through 2000 and 2001, and the take on I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings comes from the homecoming show in Oxford on 7 July 2001. In all it was played on 112 nights, and after Hamburg on 15 November 2003 it was away 910 days, until the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool on 13 May 2006.

The night it said the most was at the White River Amphitheatre south of Seattle on 31 August 2003, the last night of the summer leg. Straight after it, Ernest A. Jasmin reported in the Tacoma News Tribune, Yorke talked about the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, which he remembered as a world war on hippies, and pointed the crowd towards the organisation's next meeting, in Mexico.

pixels

Yorke called the lyric gibberish, and then, in the next breath, told Kent exactly where it came from. The chorus is a roll call of currencies, and the idea behind it was one he had been fighting with for ages.

people are basically just pixels on a screen, unknowingly serving this higher power

thom yorke · mojo, june 2001