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My father is a doctor, he's a family man |
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My mother works for charity whenever she can |
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They're both good clean |
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Americans who abide by the law |
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And they both stick up for liberty and they both support the war |
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My happiness was paid for when they laid their money down |
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For summers in a summer camp and winters in the tow |
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My future in the system was talked about and planned |
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But I gave it up for music and the free electric band |
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I went to school in hand-washed shirts with neatly ordered hair |
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And the school was big and newly built and filled with light and air |
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And the teacher taught us values that we had to learn to keep |
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And he clipped the ear of many idle kid who went to sleep |
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Then my father organized for me a college in the east |
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But I went to |
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California, the sunshine and the beach |
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My parents and my lecturers could never understand |
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Why I gave it up for music and the free electric band |
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Well, they used to sit and speculate upon their son's career |
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A lawyer or a doctor or a civil engineer |
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Just give me bread and water, put a guitar in my hand' |
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Cause all |
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I need is music and the free electric band |
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My father sent me money, and |
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I spent it very fast |
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On a girl |
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I met in Berkeley in a social science class |
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Yes, and we learnt about her body, but her mind we didn't know |
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Until deep rooted attitudes and morals began to show |
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She wanted to get married even though she never said |
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But I knew her well enough by now to see inside her head |
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She'd settle for suburbia and a little patch of land |
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So I gave her up for music and the free electric band |