The Field Sobriety Test

This song is a hoot but the story about how it came to be is pretty cool as well. I had a job in the late 70’s (yes I’m that old) that was truly boring. It involved about 10 minutes of work each hour. The other fifty minutes you simply had to sit and watch the machine do its thing. Since you couldn’t read on the factory floor I had to invent ways to keep my mind occupied. So I chose to learn the alphabet in several directions, forward, backward, from both ends toward the middle and from the middle out. I got quite good at it and eventually I could say the alphabet in any of those directions faster than most people could say it forward. This became a nifty bar trick and earned me a lot of free drinks. One particular evening I was amazing some songwriter friends of mine and one of them said, “You need to turn that into a song.” Knowing that knowledge of the alphabet is one of the standard examinations during a field sobriety test I took the next step and used that as the basis for the song containing 4 different ways to say the alphabet. By the way I’ve been told by more than one police officer that this would never work, so don’t think you can memorize these lyrics and get by. The songs a lot of fun and usually gets a few laughs every time I play it. Don’t Drink and Drive.