Take Your Partner By The Hand - Robbie Robertson, DJ Premier

Band, The

Miscellaneous

Take Your Partner By The Hand

She walks alone down a sleazy backstreet

Around a corner, up an alley to a dead end

There under a small blue light

She enters an unmarked doorway

(a low heartbeat, a low pounding escapes into the night)

This is a place she goes to fulfill a very basic need

Something people have been doing since the dawn of man

To communicate without talking

If she needs something

She makes a gesture with her hand

And mouths what she wants

She wants to make a connection

A certain kind of connection

No this is not about something from the black market

This is about no questions

This is about smoke and sweat and beats

This is about no message

Take your partner by the hand

He’s a woman, she’s a man

What’s so hard to understand

Take your partner by the hand

Mona in the promised land

Take your partner by the hand

Keep it simple if you can

Take your partner by the hand

At the club they circle around some sex goddess like vultures

Flashbulbs popping

Like bees around their queen

She is completely indifferent to all the commotion

And orders some mango tango ice cream by sign language

She’s approached by some wild-eyed poet drunk with love

I like her easy refusal, the way she shakes her head

She lives these days in the attic of an old dance hall

That’s been shut down for years

And swears there’s times when she can hear feet shuffling below

And can see the shadows swaying, moving to the music

Chorus (first half)

Elevator going up

Fifth floor

Lady’s handbags, shoes, leather accessories, and electronics

Wait a minute, where am i, on this elevator to nowhere

Going up, going down

Then like a hallucination

I saw her out of the corner of my eye

Studying some shoes very carefully

She definitely had a particular purpose for these shoes in mind

Then as quickly as she appeared, she disappeared

Back into the slash and burn of new york

Ah, stuck in traffic

Crosstown, the stress of not moving

She described it as like being locked in a car

With a madman behind the wheel

And the radio tuned to static