Clutch Roll of the Twenty Sided Die
And other dice lyrics
I’ve been enjoying Clutch’s latest album, Sunrise at Slaughter Beach. One of my favorite songs on the record, “Mountain of Bone,” features the following RPG-inspired lyrics:
Yet here I am still rolling
A twenty sided die
Am I chaotic evil
Or lawfully good aligned?
How cool is that? I don’t know if songwriter Neil Fallon plays RPGs, but he talks about his childhood reading influences, which includes Conan, starting at 21:28 of this interview.
Let’s rock out to some other songs that feature dice rolling lyrics…
Rolling Stones - “Tumbling Dice”
From the classic Exile on Main St. album, this song uses a dice metaphor throughout. Although Mick is singing about the dice game craps, the lyric “I'm all sixes and sevens and nines” always sounded to me like what you say after rolling 3d6 in order when creating a character.
Blue Öyster Cult - “Perfect Water”
With lyrics by the poet rocker Jim Carroll, the key lyrics come in the second verse: “Where two blocks of ice/ Melt into my hands like dice/And I roll seven on the floor of the sea.”
We can connect Perfect Water to another BÖC dice lyric with a little sympathetic binding:
Jim Carroll was pals with BÖC’s Allen Lanier.
The twain co-wrote the Jim Carroll Band’s “Day and Night” from the 1980 album Catholic Boy.
“Day and Night" featured the lyric “Some destinies, they should not be delivered.”
Lanier refers to that lyric in the BÖC song “In Thee” with the lyric “Jim says some destinies should not be delivered,” which came out one year before “Day and Night”!
“In Thee” also has the lyric: “Winning it makes losers of us all/’Cause the dice roll/ so indifferently.”
Q.E.D. (quod erat dice-onstrandum)
Let’s finish our tour with two songs that are explicitly about playing fantasy TTRPGs…
Loot the Body - “Roll Another One”
This song off of the +5EP from LtB is nothing less than a sober look at character death and careful examination of the singular choice left for the affected player. Check out this amazing screenshot from the video:
Mississippi Bones - “Dungeon Hustle”
Critical Hit Parader reader Robert Weber turned me on to this song last week. I was sold right away with the lyric “Dodecalicious/Ever Vicious.” Thanks, Robert!
Hey, thanks for the shout out! Sorry it took so long to acknowledge it, but my email is backed up for months! The relationship between Allen Lanier and Jim Carroll took me by surprise as much as discovering years ago that Allen knew the Godmother of Punk herself Patti Smith, but it makes complete sense to me now! Both Allen and Jim were great in their own music genres, and I'll forever remember Jim Carroll's "People Who Died". One of my all-time favorites! R.I.P.