I was intrigued when I saw the title of John Robb’s September 18th posting on this blog, “Top 10 misheard lyrics in rock,” as lyrical alteration (whether accidental or not) has always been of great interest to a rockwriter such as I. The two specific examples of misheard lyrics Robb provides are fantastic — the Beatles’ “The girl with colitis walks by,” and Fugazi’s “I am a pastry boy, I bake, I bake,
I bake!” – but in too many of his other listings, he just
gives us a general I-was-young-then-I-didn’t-know-what-they-were-singing-about disclaimer, without telling us what he misheard. Which takes all the fun out of it, of course.
In response, I’d like to report some specific ear-to-brain lyrical gaps of my own experience. My alltime favorite remains the one my girlfriend, Teresa, related to me when we were first dating in the 1960′s. She said that in the Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go,” she’d thought for a long time that “With a burning love” was followed not by the actual “That stings like a bee,” but rather, “That steams like a beet”(!) She’d imagined maybe it was some soul-food reference, until she figured out the real lyric. I’ve often thought since then that Holland-Dozier-Holland’s original metaphor is a bit mixed, and that Teresa’s misheard line actually fits the couplet better.
Entering the Seventies, I took a line in England Dan and John Ford Coley’s “I’d Really Love to See You Tonight” not as the intended “I’m not talking ’bout moving in,” but “I’m not talking ’bout millennium,” which sort of fits the song’s scenario anyway. Teresa chimed in on Don McLean’s epic “American Pie,” hearing “‘Cause I saw you dancing in the gym” as “dancing chin to chin.” (Fred Astaire, call your office!)
Around the time I was setting out to be a pro rock critic, Eric Clapton had a hit with his cover of Bob Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff” — unfortunately, I was unfamiliar with the original song, and the first time I heard Clapton’s version on the radio, I took his “I shot the sheriff/ But I did not shoot the deputy” as “I shot Sherry/ But I did not shoot Debbie.”(!) I figured out my mistake (or had it pointed out to me) early on, but then I went perverse, insisting that my version better expressed Clapton’s own suburban-whitebread verbal and conceptual persona. Even Teresa (she of the legendary mishearings) found my stubborn insistence a bit silly, but as a budding critic, I was dedicated to helping my reviewees (such as Mr. Slowhand) edify their offerings, after all.
After getting off on the right foot and some ”wrong” lyrics, Teresa and I are still together after almost 50 years. I like to think that my love for her still “steams like a beet!”
Feel free to add to this thread with your own misheard lyrics, especially ones that ended up improving the songs.
4 Responses to Misheard with a purpose . . .
These are great, Richard:colitis and the Beatles, Debbie and the sheriff, etc. Here’s one of my own: Maybe it was the year (1966), and maybe my ears, but for the longest time I heard the line in the Stones’ cut “Think” (on Aftermath) “Tell me whose fault was that, babe?” as “Tell me who sparked the Bat-craze.”
The phenomenon of the misheard song lyric (or poem, or phrase) has its own name; it’s called a ‘mondegreen’. The name was coined in an essay entitled “The Death of Lady Mondegreen,” by Sylvia Wright published in Harper’s Magazine in November 1954. Her favorite poem in childhood had a line that she heard as
“They hae slain the Earl O’ Moray,
And Lady Mondegreen.”
The last line was supposed to be “And laid him on the green”.
Fans of CCR’s ‘There’s a bathroom on the right’ (aka Bad Moon Rising) or Hendrix’s ‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy’ (Purple Haze) can take comfort in the fact that (according to a Wiki article) Fogarty and Hendrix would sometimes deliberately sing the mondegreen version in concert. Which leads to one final salient feature of a proper mondegreen.
Quoting from the wikipedia article again: ‘Wright explained the need for a new term: “The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them, is that they are better than the original.”
So from that standpoint, ‘I shot Sherry but I did not shoot Debbie’ might not actually qualify. But glad to hear things worked out with Teresa.
Many great examples are cited in the Wiki article, but my favorite little aside is the futile two year quest by the FBI to figure out the possibly subversive lyrics to ‘Louie Louie’.
“I’m proud to be an American, ’cause at least I know I’m free…”
You actually can hear John Fogerty deliberately singing “there’s a bathroom on the right” near the end of a live version of “Bad Moon Rising.” I burst out laughing in the gym, forgetting that not everyone was listening to my iPod.
One more reason to love the guy.
Thanks for the responses.
Gene, maybe Jagger actually was slipping in a “Tell me who sparked the Bat-craze,” to subliminize your consumer mind into buying a ticket to the inaugural “Batman” movie out that year. As a grad of the London School of Economics, Mick may well have foreseen that the Batman “brand” would persist well into the 21st Century, and would be a prime growth market for investors as hip as His Lipship.
Werno, I appreciate you adding “mondegreen” to my learning-in-retirement vocabulary. I don’t think I’d ever heard the term before, nor of Sylvia Wright, though she was definitely on my wavelength. The wikipedia article on mondegreens you referenced is quite fascinating, in wiki’s often Aspergeresque comprehensiveness. And you’re right — my Sherry & Debbie version of “I Shot the Sheriff” wasn’t a true mondegreen (it has metrical lacks, among other problems), but more of a rock critic’s complaint. I’ve decided to dub it a “mondocreem” (a fusion of “Mondo Cane” and the title of the mag I wrote for) instead.