Quotation from the TMBG Early Years Handbook, maintained by Myke Weiskopf <jerk@execpc.com>.

19.b) Is there a real Rabid Child?

Rabid Child is not known to be based on any specific person, but a famous country tune, "Teddy Bear" (once by Red Sovine), tells a similar story of a disabled CB operator.

While the facts contained within this document are not copyrightable, the style, organization, and content of the document is copyright (c) 1994 Myke Weiskopf. Please do not reprint or quote without permission. This document features information previously published in OBSCURE Magazine, No. 5 ("They Might Be Giants"), which is copyright (c) 1994 Obscure Publications / Myke Weiskopf.

Quoth Kasey Hicks <gaufred@leland.Stanford.EDU>:

Once I got the album and was able to listen to the words, I was even more impressed by the quiet horror of the world the song evoked, its sad beauty. The child is for me a hybrid of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird and Truffaut's Wild Child: an innocent beset by a sinister maturity beyond her full comprehension, and simultaneously a token herself of unkempt, unreachable alienness. Her inexplicable rabidity, it seems to me, creates an unstable conception of her identity, in that we are unable to decide whether she is actually diseased or if that is just her "handle." This ambiguity keeps us wobbling between pathos and amusement, holding both possibilities in our minds at once. Chess Piece Face and the Big Duluth are initially figures of buffoonery, endlessly blurting the jargonemes "rabbit ears" and "hammer down," "the only words they know," but are finally poignant; like the rabid child, their names throw their subjectivity into question (are they two of the "truckers" that "pass by, calling out their handles to the kid," in which case "Rabbit Ears" and "Hammer Down" are their handles? or are they unable to declare their handles, limited to these two empty phrases that have no relation to anything? In either case the names CPF and BD are presumably unknowable to them, and accordingly their identities are radically unstable), and at the end of the song we are invited to share their pathological near-aphasia: "If you pass the rabid child, say 'hammer down' for me." Even the speaker, who asks us to say these words for him, is thereby implicated in this limitation. This must of course lead to paradox, as he has obviously been using other words throughout the song. But is the self of song the true self? the "speaking" self? is singing speaking?

At any rate, I still cannot hear the song without entering its dark imaginary. The "home" at which the child "sits" is as much a spiritual state as a physical space, as is the road (to me, a road through a black forest of pines) on which the "truckers pass," and yet it is also a vivid image of material entrapment, of drab suburban secrecy and longing. The world that passes by outside, and occasionally sends in a few disembodied messages, is both nightmarish and alluring.

I cannot wrap this up without saying a word about the music: that brachiopod of a melody that keeps coiling back on itself, oozing sadness, ultimately forcing closure on its unbearable setting with an electronic thud.

Quoth Jeremy Bronheim <bronheim@fechner.ccs.brandeis.edu>:

This song is short and strange. I believe the first line is the most important. "Rabid child stays at home, talks on a CB." A CB radio, which explains why the truckers are calling out their handles to the Rabid child. Chess Piece Face and The Big Duluth seem to be handles, although they seem unconventional for CB. Why they can only say "Hammer down" and "rabbit ears" I don't know, but the last line suggests that "hammer down" is some type of greeting.

Quoth Ash <hall@cats.ucsc.edu>:

I was hitchhiking on bigrigs last summer when it occured to me to ask the CB-operating truck driver what 'hammer down' and 'rabbit ears' mean.

'Hammer down' is a trucker exclamation roughly translating to 'All right! Go fast! Kick butt!'

'Rabbit ears' means that there is a police car on the road, and to watch one's speed.