Isn’t “Bridge Over Troubled Water” about weed, dope, pot? So isn’t it weird that they are playing some version of it on the Christian music stations?
Could we get a cite for that? I find it hard to believe, myself, even in the the cultural context of the time it was written.
As for being played on the Christian music station, the lyrics can easily be viewed as referring to God.
Having just reviewed the lyrics I just don’t see any connection to pot. Where did you get this idea?
I got to admit that this one has me really baffled as well. I’m pretty familiar with the lyrics, and to say that it is about drugs is one of the more fanciful interpretations I’ve seen of any song.
No. Puff the Magic Dragon isn’t either.
I found this page.
Scroll down about 2/3. There’s the drug reference interpretation. Underneath is a more likely meaning.
Wilson Bryan Key, in his classic “Subliminal Seduction” very conclusively proved that this song was about drugs.
He did the same with the Beatles song “Hey Jude.”
Well, I really have no idea where I heard it was about pot.
I don’t think at all that Bridge over troubled water makes any reference to drugs. I can however see a Christian musician covering that song. And oh, I shudder at the thought. Good song though.
Mr. Blue Sky, that is the silliest site I have ever seen. In its references to James Taylor, for example, one possible explanation given for the line “sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground” is that Taylor’s girlfriend Susan was killed in a plane accident. In actuality, The Flying Machine was the name of Taylor’s band at one time.
I always thought Bridge was not even a little bit symbolic, except perhaps as a metaphor for friendship. Sometimes, people, a cigar is just a cigar.
Oh, I know, but it was relevant to the OP.
Try reading the 80’s interpretations.
When you try to put meanings to songs, you tend to bring out the tinfoil hat crowd. Even if the writer of song tells you exactly what they meant, there’s gonna be someone who will argue with them. Take “Don’t Fear the Reaper”, for example. It is NOT about suicide.
Why?
I remember watching VH1 some countdown that happened months ago. When BOTW was reached, each musician they interviewed said it was the best song ever recorded regarding friendship.
It’s not very well known that the song “Happy Birthday to You” is about drugs. I found out about this from Archibald A. Hill, who owned the copyrights to the song back when I knew him. (He died sometime back in the early 1990’s.) The song was written by his aunts Mildred and Patty Hill, and he had inherited the copyrights from them.
Back in the mid-1970’s, when I was a grad student in linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, he was an emeritus professor in that department. He had spent some of his royalties from “Happy Birthday” on creating a library for the linguistics department. I worked there as part of my way of paying my way through grad school.
He had an enormous supply of dope and frequently he’d invite me to join him smoking it. One afternoon, when we’d just gotten completely wasted on some killer weed, he told me that his aunts had written the song “Happy Birthday” to express their feelings about drugs. Here’s what he said that the words actually meant:
Happy birthday to you.
(We love to smoke marijuana all day.)
Happy birthday to you.
(Cocaine and heroin are really great too.)
Happy birthday, dear Wendell.
(Wendell, you should spend your birthday blitzed out of your mind on a whole bunch of drugs.)
Happy birthday to you.
(And LSD is nice too.)
“Wait a minute, Archie,” I said. “Your aunts wrote the song in the early twentieth century. LSD wasn’t even discovered until 1943, and it wasn’t well known till the 1960’s. How could they have known about it?”
“That’s the great thing about drugs,” he said. “It allows you to predict the future.”
“Another thing,” I asked. “How could the words “Happy birthday to you” have three different meanings in the three times you sing it in the song?”
“It’s the way you say it that matters,” he said. “Most people don’t understand that. They screw up the intonation completely and mess up the meaning of the song.”
Then we went to a Mexican restaurant on Guadalupe Street next to the campus where Archie told the waiters to all come out and sing us “Happy Birthday,” dressed in these absurd bullfighter vests and sombreros that that they wore in that place. (Actually, it wasn’t either of our birthdays.) Then he demanded that we get a free meal in place of the royalties the restaurant owed him for using the song.
Are you missing a rolling-eye smilie here? Cecil thinks this guy is a nutcase. I agree.