The song that would become the Stray Katz ballad “Cup of Gold” (always a favorite at Katz live concerts) began as a guitar riff by Rick Wood and tells the simple, tragic story of a youth who makes an important realization after it’s too late. He lives by the ocean and is in love with a woman who presumably loves him just as much. Yet he can’t see that, by such love, he is already a wealthy man. He wants to be rich in the most worldly (and egocentric) sense. Fame, success—the “Cup of Gold”—call to him, and he leaves his partner, boards a ship and sets out “beyond the Great White” with 15 other similar souls to find fortune.

The venture ultimately leads to disaster, with the ship becoming wrecked and lost at sea, but even more tragic than this is the wreck of the youth’s relationship with the woman he left behind. On one hand, he professes his innocence, saying, “Now me, I’m not a dirty man.” Yet by admission he has found companionship wherever he could on his quest, and if such conflict eats away at him even as he drifts lost on the ocean, he seems to seek solace and acquittal by comparing his discretions against the purely monetary motives of others and self-righteously crying out, “Now you, you’re such a filthy man. You make your money anyway, anyway that you can.” In such moments, as tragic as they are, redemption does have its own sense of peace. Yet that isn’t even there for him in the end. As his thoughts and feelings become a garble of half-finished things he wished he’d said and aspirations gone unrealized, he still cries out “One time!” as he drifts away unknown past the horizon. In other words, as far as he has traveled and for all that he has lost in what should have been a major life-awakening, his soul remains plagued by that one shot at a fortune that he had to begin with. If any wine would be suitable to fill this ironically named cup of gold, it would be a most bitter vintage indeed.

“Cup of Gold” was recorded in two takes—one for all instruments, one for vocals—at the same studio where the Katz recorded “Billy, Where’d You Buy the Dope?” Like most Katz recordings, the song was recorded sometime after midnight but before dusk, when studio rates were most affordable. In the case of “Cup of Gold,” this just means the song’s somewhat dreamy quality was largely due to the fact that the Katz were likely half-asleep when they made the recording.