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 was turned into a song afterwards by cutting the tape. 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, then edit. Yorke named the man he took it from, Can's Holger Czukay, who produced them, and 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 Georgia Straight in Vancouver the same account in June 2001: a live jam, then a live jam that had been cut up. Reynolds called the result one of the album's highlights.

strings by way of alice coltrane

The orchestra got in through Colin's record collection. On BBC Radio 3's Mixing It in January 2001, five months before the record was out, he described putting an Alice Coltrane record on over the top of the track. Jonny then wrote a string arrangement in something like her style for the Orchestra of St John's. On the same programme Jonny named the records he meant: the Impulse sides crowded with harps, bells and tambourines, Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders.

The strings were recorded in Dorchester Abbey, the twelfth-century church near the band's studio. Yorke told Reynolds they were there to lend the track some authority, and on the record they do more than that: they swell until they are louder than the singer.

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

Twenty years on, Chris DeVille at Stereogum heard it as a sequel to “The National Anthem”, folding the band's jazz, classical and krautrock habits together in a way “Pyramid Song” had not.

on stage

It was out on the road long before it was out in the shops. The archive has it first at the Théâtre Antique in Arles on 13 June 2000, four months before Kid A and a year before Amnesiac, and it was played 33 times that year and 35 in 2001. The 2003 site kept a reviewer's note from Canada's Jam! that the record came out less lurching than the live version, with the rhythm section hammering out a tricky time signature under the strings.

It was one of the songs taped for Later... with Jools Holland on 9 June 2001, and a live take went onto I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings that November. On 20 August 2003 at Merriweather Post Pavilion it was one of eleven songs changed from the Camden set two nights before.

Then a gap: Hamburg's Colorline Arena on 15 November 2003, and nothing until the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool on 13 May 2006, 910 days later. It had 16 nights in 2008 and a last one at the Music Box at the Fonda in Los Angeles on 24 January 2010. That is 112 nights, and it never opened or closed a show.

When the 2003 site asked its readers for their favourite Amnesiac song in January 2003, it got 12 votes. Only “Hunting Bears” and “Morning Bell” did worse.

covers

When Stereogum marked the album's tenth anniversary in June 2011 with a cover of every track, “Dollars and Cents” went to FloodFill.