Song of the Day 8/24: The Tubes, “She’s a Beauty”

The biggest surprise about the right-wing freakout over drag queens is that they haven’t yet shifted the focus to porn. If they’re going to get upset over men putting women’s clothes on, imagine their reaction to women taking their clothes off.

Maybe they’re just so accustomed to sex being used to sell everything else that they no longer blink at sex being used to sell sex. That’s progress from the days when Tubes frontman Fee Waybill walked through San Francisco’s red light district and found inspiration for the band’s biggest hit. It reached No. 1 on the rock chart and No. 10 on the Hot 100 in 1983.

Out in front of this one massage parlor there was a kiosk that was like a phone booth. It was enclosed, and the sign said, “PAY A DOLLAR, TALK TO A NAKED GIRL.” It was supposed to arouse you so you would go into the “happy ending” type of massage parlor.

You put a dollar in, the wall slides down, and there is a girl in there who is scantily clad. She starts disrobing, at the same time talking about, “Hey baby, come on in. We’ll take care of you.” I was such a rube and so naïve. It was this gorgeous girl, and I’m going, “What are you doing this for? You’re so gorgeous, why are you doing this? You could be a model.”

We were looking for new Tubes dancers because we had lost our dancers between the last album and this one, so I kept saying, “You can be a dancer in The Tubes. Can you dance? Can you sing?” And she just completely ignored whatever I said and kept giving her speech, her spiel. Before she would actually take anything off, the thing would come down again, and it was, “Pay another dollar.”

The music was composed by producer David Foster, probably best known for co-writing “Man in Motion,” the No. 1 hit from the 1985 film “St. Elmo’s Fire.”