Just heard Spill the Wine on my radio on the way home in the car. I used to sneak my AM transistor radio under my pillow just to hear that tune. Listening to WABC in NYC in the 5th or 6th grade. Anyway, I thought it was a cool song as a kid and still do. Inspired me to do a search on the lyrics before bed tonight and stumbled on your page. Doesn't seem to matter what the words mean. They're just a pleasure riff for me.

Buzz,

Stumbled upon your site while researching lyrics for Spill The Wine. It is definitely about trippin' n' partyin' as the spanish lyrics reveal. I have them if you're interested. I haven't written down the translation yet but, there is definitely some trippin' going on as the woman says that "everything is blue because i'm tripping!" and "i'm in my groove with my buddies".

The reason i'm looking for lyrics however, is because almost everyone seems to have the expression "take that pearl" while i've always heard "dig that girl"! So far, i've only found one other source that has it as "take that girl". I am not familiar with any expression of "taking a pearl" although i'm sure it could be some form of acid back in the 60's. I know there was stuff like "purple haze" and other aliases for acid & LSD but i haven't heard of "pearls". Do you know if it refers to some specific drug?

Spill the wine, take that pearl...
Hamlet, act 5, scene 2

Cheers,
Mic

Fantastic, I allways wondered where that came from. I'm not too surprized to learn that it came from The Bard himself, I'm not finding a solid reference to this, I checked on http://the-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/hamlet/hamlet.5.2.html are you referring to another version ?

Friends: I must have listened to this song 25 times, and, whatever the written lyrics, eric is singing "do I dig that girl" Please, please don't tell me you hear otherwise.

I used to listen to this mostly at the insitance of my sister who was the sole person responsible for turning on my life to the more peaceful things in life.
Was digging the song again on a CD THE SUMMER OF PEACE, LOVE, & MUSIC and realized that the late 60's to mid 70's had some of the most influential tunes. It was a great time to become aware of music and it's true and inferred meanings.
Still a Lennonite ,
PEACE

Call me stoopid, (if you do i dont care cause i'll never know), but i'm very sure the lyrics contain both versions. ie: "do i dig that girl" and "spill the wine, take that pearl" and a combination of them both.
It seems to me its all just a dream...

If you forget the title of the song, and don't expect or assume that what you are hearing is 'Spill the wine', you can clearly hear Eric singing: "Do I dig that girl? Do I dig that pearl?" in nearly most of the instances of this part of the song.

I am inclined to think that the girl is a syringe, and the pearl is heroin, and the wine being spilled is the mixing of blood and heroin in the syringe while injecting. Likewise, I have always figured there's a similar reference in the Stones' song 'You can't always get what you want', when Mick sings, 'We decided that we would have a soda, our favorite flavor, cherry red"....another reference to heroin and shooting up. Hope this doesn't bring you listeners down to consider all those fun melodies and innocent lyrics we sang along with had to do with some sort of hardcore drug use by the rock stars at the time. Most Steely Dan lyrics seem to have something to do with hardcore drugs too if you begin to read between the lines and consider the innuendos of China, pearls of the orient, Dr. Wu, the heroin trade from Asia (Aja). Likewise, 'Mother of Pearl' by Roxy Music. The list goes on and on.

It is "pearl", although most of us remember it as "girl".

The pearl referred to the pearl of the orient, i.e. heroin. Spilling the wine was a slang term for the blood that dripped when you were doing the drugs. A similar song is Mother of Pearl, by Roxy Music, where the singer says

"Oh mother of pearl
I wouldn’t trade you
For another girl"

Well, I didn't know about that slang "spill the wine" but it seems, at last, a clear meaning.
And yet I think several meanings are true. Maybe it's why I always found that song so fascinating... I try to understand it too.

First, I hear both "spill that wine, take that pearl" and "dig that girl", depending on the verse.

As for the Shakespeare lead, it seems right too: in the general slaughter at the end of Hamlet, a pearl is thrown in the poisoned cup of wine, more or less a symbol of all the corruption and sin that will end with all of those deaths: the maid, the mother, the king, the prince... King Claudius says:
"Stay; give me drink. Hamlet, this pearl is thine; Here's to thy health."
Hamlet will refuse the wine and not take the pearl... His mother will drink, and the king, who'll get his pearl back.

As for the drugs, the whole song seems a catalogue. The soft ones are there: "tall grass" (mexican grass in some versions), wine and trip : dream, hallucinations (all in my head), and the woman's words as Rick said - by the way, I'd like to know that spanish lyrics, I can't understand spoken spanish. And a hard one too, according to the heroin interpretation.

I see a third meaning, purely sexual, that seems obvious. Whether you "dig that girl", "take that girl" or "take that pearl", women are all around, surrounding the naked man... and the man is invited by the lady (the madam?) to "spill" his -white- "wine".

On a video, a TV recording I think, Eric Burdon uses a suggestive stage act while he sings that:
He mimes pouring the wine into the glass.
"She raised it to her lips"
He raises a long metallic pendant and holds it above his mouth during the following verse.
"and just before she drank it, she looked me dead in the eye and said:"
He slips the pendant into his (her) mouth and mime pushing it in - don't panic: it's flexible - , then withdraws it and sings on, frenzied:
"Get it! Get it! Get it! Get it! Spill that wine, take that pearl!"

Honestly I can't see the druggy or shakespearian interpretation ;-)

Love is all around...

hey people, great song, and i came across this site looking for the music video to this song, i saw it once on VH1 classics. anyways does anyone know where to find good 60s acid rock videos? for free? if you do please let me know at: dirtfisch@hotmail.com, i would really apreciate it, thanks everyone :)