My second-favorite mishearing of mine of all time (I can’t think of my favorite, or I’d post that, too) is from Pulp’s “Mis-Shapes.”
Pulp version: “We won’t use guns, we won’t use bombs”
My version: “We want cheese scones, we want cheese balls”
And if ones from childhood count, my dad has a recording of me singing “Silent Night” in which I clearly say, “Sweeping heavenly pee-eeeeeee.”
I thought the part about “…and meanwhile back…” from Penny Lane was “…eat wild rice…” til just recently.
My mom always heard “Don’t mess around with the guy in shads, oh no” from Sunglasses at Night was “Don’t mess around with the Diet Seven Up.”
As you probably know it’s “wrapped up like a deuce”, which goes some way toward explaining the confusion. Wrapping up a “douche” makes a modicum of sense, even if it sounds somewhat bizarre. But how on earth does one wrap up a “deuce”?
Same goes for ELO and “Don’t bring me down ‘Bruce’”–really"DBMD ‘Groos’"–a bit of lyrical complete inanity for which I feel ELO has never been sufficiently excoriated. You’d wonder why they were singing to ‘Bruce’, but at least it made more sense than ‘Groos’.
When Abbey Road first came out, I thought Paul McCartney was singing about racial equality in “You Never Give Me Your Money”:
One sweet dream:
Here come the blacks, getting to live the scene
For any young whippersnappers who might not know the song, it’s really “Pick up the bags, get in the limousine.”
On a somewhat similar subject, I thought Dylan was saying in “Hurricane” that
If you’re black you might as well not show up on the street
'less you want to drive a heap.
It’s really “…draw the heat.”
Yes on the dogs…
and I always sung it sorta like She’s so fruc-ti-ay… I figured I was missing something and so aimed for some level of phonetic pronounciation! 
Isn’t it “revved up like a deuce”? But for years I too thought it was “wrapped up like a douche.”
Groos???
I swear, it never, ever occured to me that it WASN’T Bruce. It also never occured to me to wonder WHY it was Bruce.
Groos.
Screw that, I’m still gonna sing “Bruce” 
I think it’s “revved” in Springsteen’s original, “wrapped” in Manfred Mann’s remake.
Speaking of the Manfred Mann remake, I think the lead singer really did sing the word “douche,” knowing they could fall back on the authority of the lyrics to save their asses from trouble. Careful listening (to me) reveals the unistakable “ch” sound in “douche” in his vocal.
Springsteen clearly sings “deuce” in his orginal.
Sir Rhosis
Yep. Yep, yep, yep. I don’t hear ‘poolhall ace’ any more after finding out what it really is, but I still sing it occasionally.
Also, when I was a kid, I couldn’t figure out the chorus of Scarborough Fair.
What I heard was:
Partially save Rosemary in time…
I had no clue what it meant, but it was a fun image.
Jeff explained this on VH1’s Storytellers. He did say “groos”, which, to the album’s German engineer, sounded like the German word for “great”. He asked Jeff if spoke German and Jeff said no, he just made up the word.
However, he was aware people thought he was saying “Bruce” because they would yell it out at concerts. So he decided to start saying it, too.
Also, the French line from “Games Without Frontiers” is sung by Kate Bush.
I recall listening to Sam Cooke’s “Twisting the Night Away” as a kid and thinking he was saying, “Man, you’ll find a whole in your arm, twisting the night away” instead of, “Man, you’ll find the old and young, …”.
I almost made that claim when I originally brought it up, but I wasn’t 99% positive, so I deleted the comment and fixed it. Glad to know I wasn’t imagining it.
I used to sing “Lets drink to London…” in ELO’s Last Train to London - pretty unforgiveable when the real lyrics are in the title to the song. :smack:
For Australian Dopers, a friend of mine used to sing the chorus of Australian Crawl’s song Reckless “Shit on myyy… Fat Cat in the graveyard” (instead of “She don’t mi-i-ind… that kind of behaviour”).
For those who need it (from the AMG):
It keeps me stable for days
In cars
Looks like…
… if you did
Burning out his fuse up here alone.
I’m not bothering with R.E.M. I’m fully convinced that Michael Stipe was never quite clear on what his lyrics were, and just made them up on his own. I still have no freakin’ clue what they really say in Radial Free Europe 
Gotta love some Simple Minds for misheard lyrics fun. A couple of my favorites:
Who’s got the touch to calm a storm inside?
Who’s gonna save you?
I AM THE DICKIE!!!
Real lyrics: “alive and kicking”. It still sounds like “I am the dickie”, though. Who the hell pronouces “alive” as “eye-lahv”? My friend misheard this one too; he thought it was “I am the ticket”.
Promised you a miracle
Beef is a beauty thing
Real lyrics: “belief is a beauty thing”. Personally, I think it works either way. Give me a 9oz. filet mignon, cooked to perfect medium rare, and we’re talking a serious beauty thing.
Then there’s Tears For Fears. Roland’s enunciation is a bit odd, so he’s fairly easy to mishear, for some pretty amusing results.
Hungry men, they close their minds
Like deers on my pillowfold
Real lyrics: “ideas are not their food”. Or, more accurately, “Eye deez ah nah they-ah fuuhd.” It’s one of Roland’s more bizzare vocal stylings.
White light, over the rainbow
Stay bright, just a potato
Real lyrics: “dressed up in day-glo”. I still want a glowing potato, though.
Whoa, slip and slide
Did she go all chewy-eyed?
Real lyrics: “did she go all dewey-eyed?” I’m sure eyeballs are quite chewy, but it’s not something I care to think about.
And then, of course, there’s Radiohead. It’s probably better if I don’t start on Radiohead. First of all, most of my misheard lyrics are not actual words. Second, the ones that are tend to make more sense than the real lyrics, so it’s a bit anticlimactic. Suffice it to say that if you can tell what Thom Yorke is saying, please let him know; he still has no clue what the lyrics to Dollars and Cents are, so he makes up new words at each concert.
I thought for a long time that the Blues Brothers were singing, “I’ma so mad…”
My most recent screw-up is Macy Gray’s “I Try”. She sings “my world crumbles” but for the longest time I heard “I blow bubbles”. I could have sworn it was “I blow bubbles”. So certain was I of this misheard lyric, it left me bemused: Why in the hell would one blow bubbles as a means of coping with a breakup? Is it relaxing? Is “blowing bubbles” a euphamism for something else, like smoking crack, or masturbating, or wanting to drown oneself? What…does…it…mean?
Oh, I got this one! Still don’t like the song very much, though.
A couple of people mentioned the “burning out his fuse” line in “Rocket Man” – this one, I could never figure out until I heard Stewie’s Shatneresque spoken-word rendition on Family Guy.
This is usually the case, though, with their songs…
Back when I was a teen, WZLX, the local classic rock station, had a call-in contest where people would try to interpret unintelligible lyrics like these “burning out his fuse up here alone” took about half a week to solve, and “Turned around the corner, things got real hot, real fast” from Springsteen’s “10th Avenue Freeze-out” (or, as I always heard it “Tent Devil, You Free Now”) had to finally be retired after two weeks of flailing.
Are you sure Springsteen did that song first? I used to have a Manfred Mann album and I could’ve sworn that was the only song on it that he actually wrote.
astro: I also thought it was “I’m a poolhall ace”, right up until I read your post that said it wasn’t!
All of mine are of less popular songs, so they wouldn’t be as funny. These are cracking me up though! Wtf IS a Train Weaver?!