Grant Lee Phillips once said that he originally intended Lone Star Song to be about conspiracy theories concerning the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but he got a little carried away with the events of the Waco Siege and the song evolved. A lot of the lyrics can be interpreted as both:
"They had him nailed up to a T with a T for Texas."
- JFK was the first Roman Catholic US president. He was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
- David Koresh was believed by his followers to be the second coming of Christ, therefore being revered as the human embodiment of the Messiah.
"His disciples with artillery they held the fort inside."
- The "disciples with artillery" are JFK's secret service agents. Right after JFK was shot, one of them jumped onto the limousine and tried to regain control of the "fort inside."
- Koresh's "disciples" firmly believed that Koresh was the second coming of Jesus Christ, and therefore believed that God was speaking through him. God wanted them to stay in the compound, so they stayed to defend the 'fort? with ample ammunition.
"And by the time the story broke down at Dealey Plaza."
- JFK was shot in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, where "our story broke."
- The first message from Koresh is relayed over KRLD Radio in Dallas on February 28, 1993, the day the compound was first raided by the ATF.
"We'd already covered the smoke, read the TV guide."
- It seems that just as soon as these incidents occurred, the media had already broadcasted "smoke," or disasters, across the nation, on TVs, radios, newspapers, etc. So all one had to do was "read the TV guide."
From: https://www.songfacts.com/facts/grant-lee-buffalo/lone-star-song
"For me Texas exists in in this sort of mythological way, and what I was writing about was largely Texas the myth, the Texas I've come to know through movies and recent events in history. I started writing that song focusing on the JFK assassination and all of the weird conspiracies that surround that assassination. All of it begins to sound very myth like. I started it from that point, and then maybe two or three weeks later this thing happened in Waco that I'm sure you're familiar with (the David Koresh-Branch Davidian-FBI holocaust) so the song sort of took a different direction at that point. I sorta wanted to talk about two stories within one song but all of it is a sort of a myth, or a collage of myths. It wasn't long after the Waco incident that I heard it emerged on television, that there was a sort of a television drama that came out, and soon the OJ Simpson story will be told - in many ways it's being told right now, but a dramatization will feature. I'm just perplexed by that. It's so important in America, America is such a dreamland." Source: Things Grant Always What They Seem, Rave Magazine, December 1994
From: http://www.homespunarchive.com/comments/mjm.htm
