Otis Redding - Cigarettes and Coffee
Sure, you might find a better 3AM song, but it’s not going to be easy. You know why I drink black coffee? My dad weaned me on it. I was nine. We were at the water park late, right before closing, and there was no hot chocolate. He put together a cup of black with two creamers and four sugars. Brilliant. I would find him drinking it in the mornings - black, always - reading the paper, the man in his place of peace. It tasted like shit the first few times he let me try it, but then he started drinking flavored coffee. Insidious. Any additional sweetening to that would make null and void the sharp, distinct quality of having it with the terror of the oncoming week (you’ve never read the Review Journal on a Sunday).
And the cigarettes? Since 8th Grade, but that was just a dabbling. In 9th Grade, I spent a BBYO event in Sara Starrfield’s - a senior - jeep in Scottsdale, long past curfew, where she played me The Bends for the first time and introduced me to Kamel Red Lights, a brand I haven’t been able to smoke since. I was a precocious dork and she had friends who played pool and drank whiskey, and clearly, they were fucking maniacs. I was in awe, and she was in love with my friend, another senior, Ben Newman, who was in love not so much with someone else as he was with anarchy and marxism and Valley Girl. Eight years later, and they’re still never going to be as good as they were then, when I was getting away with something, when something was happening.
But this isn’t a song about one thing - it’s a song about two things: the moment right before the moment you’re having is over, when you know you’re going to leave, and move inside from a doorstep, or from the diner to the parking lot to the car. Or the moment right when you know a moment isn’t over, but it will be. And you want to prolong it. You want to make it last. You want to be stuck in that strange space that is 2:45 AM forever, and it’s fair. It’s fair because at no other time do certain things make total sense that wouldn’t at any other time. This isn’t a bad thing, and those feral-looking freak addicts in the diner with you? Right now, they’re not just not such bad people - they’re your people. And for a second, New York reminds you of the city you never knew but you’ve always been sentimental for. And then that’s gone, too.
But really, like most Otis Redding songs, it just makes me want to fuck.
(Download here).