Frank Piatek’s use of the tube traces back to several images that impressed him as a young artist. These include pictures of spaghetti that the Pop artist James Rosenquist employed in his paintings, as well as images of American astronauts tethered to their capsules during the first walks in space. “Sock it to me” is an expression that became a popular colloquialism after 1967, when Aretha Franklin recorded her version of Otis Redding’s 1965 song “Respect,” for which it served as a coda. It gained further notoriety when the popular television show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In adopted it as a punch line for a recurring joke.