Every time I hear it, I swear he sings the following:
Livin’ easy
Lovin’ free
Sees a nigger on a one way ride
I looped through this verse over and over just now, and I am convinced he is not singing “Season ticket on a one way ride.”
Am I delusional? Crazy? I dunno. But I did a quick google search and it appears I am not alone on this.
I don’t know if you’re crazy or delusional, but I’ve always heard the lyric as:
Season ticket on a one-way ride
Which makes sense, given the theme of the song.
Bon Scott was Australian. Australians do not use the epithet nigger.
Well this is ACDC not a Shakespearean sonnet but the song is entirely in first person except, apparently for this line, for which the suggested mondegreen doesn’t fit the rhyme, phrasing or context as well as the published lyrics.
Sounds more like season tigger or digger to me. Definitely doesn’t sound like ticket.
Enunciation wasn’t Bon’s strongest point, bless him, but I always heard “season ticket”.
Season ticket on a one way ride.
Bon Scott could be claimed to be many things - a rude, crude, idiot of a rogue who drank himself to death in the back of a car, but I am not seeing this.
Yup, not hearing it either.
Just played it on the ribbons (crystal clear! Unlike my hearing), turned down the bass, and heard him say “season ticket”. Except that he pronounces ticket to sound more like “tig-gid” to me. I definitely didn’t hear what the OP heard.
What makes you say this? We don’t have the same history with the word as the US, but nigger has been used as both an epithet and nickname in Australia.
Having said that, Season ticket was the verse.
Season Ticket, remember he was a drunken aussie bogan and enunciation was not his strong suit.
RIP.
I lived in Australia for five years and I never heard it used.
It seems to have been quite popular back in colonial days - if you read letters from the 19th century they’re often full of it, illogical though it may be. But, yeah, I could say the same as you, except substitute “forty-four years”
Everyone knows that Michael Jackson was singing “the chair is not my son”, right?
The chair was plastic and mostly white. Easy mistake for someone to make.
“Excuse me while I kiss this guy”
Presumably not in Queensland then.
There was a 10 year fight to rename the ES Nigger Brown stand in Toowoomba. There are still places called Nigger Creek, Nigger Head, Mt Nigger, Nigger’s Bounce etc.
Yeah, there’s a long sad history of substituting “ticket” for “nigger” in thepublished lyrics.
The Beatles’ Ticket To Ride, and Eddie Money’s Two Tickets to Paradise. And of course, in The Letter by The Boxtops.
Bon was actually born in Scotland as were the Young brothers I never heard the racial slur in there but a coworker of mine thought Night Prowler off of the same album actually said white power
Yeah, it just sounds to me like he ends up voicing all the consonants there, so instead of “ticket” I hear something like “diggid,” slurred and swallowed in that classic Bon Scott manner. I guess I can hear “nigger” if I want to, but it’s never occurred to me before. It doesn’t make a lick of sense, either, in the context of the lyrics.