# Early Radio Edits
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/early-radio-edits/841875
**Category:** Cafe Society
**Created:** [October 16, 2019, 10:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/early-radio-edits/841875 "2019-10-16T22:17:51Z")
**Posts on this page:** 16
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Author\_Balk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Author_Balk)
#### Post date: [October 16, 2019, 10:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/early-radio-edits/841875/1 "2019-10-16T22:17:51Z")
Meaning released songs that had an “offensive” word edited out or replaced with an inoffensive word.
The earliest one I can think of is Money by Pink Floyd. Were there any earlier?
What other earlier songs had offensive words edited out?
Or songs that were “self-censoring” such as the “shut your mouth” in the Theme from Shaft?
How about local radio stations that censored songs? For example, a station I listened to edited out “damn”. For a while I thought Leroy Brown was “the baddest man in the whole town”.
Any related interesting facts or stories?
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### Author:  [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)
#### Post date: [October 16, 2019, 10:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/early-radio-edits/841875/2 "2019-10-16T22:24:23Z")
[Lola by The Kinks](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=851385)? It wasn’t an “offensive” word that was edited out (actually, replaced), but a trademark.
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### Author:  [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)
#### Post date: [October 16, 2019, 10:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/early-radio-edits/841875/3 "2019-10-16T22:30:30Z")
The first one that springs to mind is the AM radio version of the Steve Miller Band’s “Jet Airliner,” in which “funky shit goin’ down in the city” became “funky kicks goin’ down in the city.”
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### Author:  [@Joey\_P](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Joey_P)
#### Post date: [October 16, 2019, 10:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/early-radio-edits/841875/4 "2019-10-16T22:50:54Z")
It was a decade after Money came out, but the one I always think of is Money For Nothing. There’s a handful of variations out there that remove the word faggot, but the original is probably played as often as any of the clean ones.
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### Author:  [@notfrommensa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/notfrommensa)
#### Post date: [October 16, 2019, 10:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/early-radio-edits/841875/5 "2019-10-16T22:59:01Z")
There is a sanitized version of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”
“Cause I told you once, you son of a [del]bitch[/del] gun,
I’m the best that’s ever been!”
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### Author:  [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)
#### Post date: [October 16, 2019, 11:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/early-radio-edits/841875/6 "2019-10-16T23:03:33Z")
Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” (1967) had the line “making love in the green grass” replaced by copying a line from a previous verse, “laughin’ and a-runnin’, hey hey.”
Lots of television shows censored lyrics. Ed Sullivan was notorious for telling groups to change lyrics he didn’t like. The Doors were supposed to change “we couldn’t get any higher” in Light My Fire. They agreed but sang it anyway. Sullivan never had them back.
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### Author:  [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)
#### Post date: [October 16, 2019, 11:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/early-radio-edits/841875/7 "2019-10-16T23:16:13Z")
Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome” had the word “crap” edited out, either by bleeping it, or by replacing it with “girls” from another verse. It was different on different stations: some just played it as recorded.
Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue” bleeped out “son of a bitch.” That was probably the record company’s idea.
The Rolling Stones performed “Let’s Some Time Together” on Sullivan due to censors restrictions.
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### Author:  [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)
#### Post date: [October 16, 2019, 11:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/early-radio-edits/841875/8 "2019-10-16T23:18:28Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#):
>
> The Doors were supposed to change “we couldn’t get any higher” in Light My Fire. They agreed but sang it anyway. Sullivan never had them back.
And I bet that was almost as damaging to their career as never appearing with Arthur Godfrey.
Interesting arc implied in this thread: Radio edits going from a non-issue because those words weren’t in popular music anyway, to radio edits being a cramp on the artists’ style because they wanted to remain relevant in the face of a mass media world which wasn’t changing quickly enough, to radio edits being a non-issue because you don’t have to edit a goddamn thing for Soundcloud or Spotify.
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### Author:  [@Lord\_Mondegreen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lord_Mondegreen)
#### Post date: [October 16, 2019, 11:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/early-radio-edits/841875/9 "2019-10-16T23:44:55Z")
When I was young, the local radio station beeped out every “Christ” from The Ballad of John and Yoko.
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### Author:  [@mbh](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mbh)
#### Post date: [October 17, 2019, 12:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/early-radio-edits/841875/10 "2019-10-17T00:50:20Z")
“Tutti Frutti” by Little Richard.
Supposedly, the refrain originally went:
“Tutti Frutti, good booty
If it don’t fit, don’t force it
You can grease it, make it easy”
or
“Tutti Frutti, good booty
If it’s tight, it’s all right
And if it’s greasy, it makes it easy”
For the clean version, recorded in 1955, the refrain was replaced by several repetitions of
“Tutti Frutti, aw rooty”
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### Author:  [@Musicat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Musicat)
#### Post date: [October 17, 2019, 1:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/early-radio-edits/841875/11 "2019-10-17T01:08:12Z")
> [@mbh](#):
>
> “Tutti Frutti” by Little Richard.
>
> Supposedly, the refrain originally went:
>
> “Tutti Frutti, good booty
> If it don’t fit, don’t force it
> You can grease it, make it easy”
>
> or
>
> “Tutti Frutti, good booty
> If it’s tight, it’s all right
> And if it’s greasy, it makes it easy”
>
> For the clean version, recorded in 1955, the refrain was replaced by several repetitions of
>
> “Tutti Frutti, aw rooty”
That sounds like an urban legend, a post-rationalization story. Do you have any good evidence for your claim?
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### Author:  [@Kent\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kent_Clark)
#### Post date: [October 17, 2019, 2:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/early-radio-edits/841875/12 "2019-10-17T02:33:32Z")
The radio version of _A Boy Named Sue_ bleeped “I’m the son of a bitch that named you Sue.”
I worked in radio during the 1970s. You never knew what a boss was going to order cut. At one easy listening station I worked, the boss pulled Paul Anka’s sappy _Having My Baby_ while at the same time somehow overlooking Gordon Lightfoot’s _Sundown_. At a country station, the boss (actually, his wife) decided _Take This Job and Shove It_ was offensive. Some of our DJ’s were fine with Loretta Lynn’s ode to birth control _The Pill_, while others wouldn’t play it during their shifts. Over on the FM rock side Billy Joel’s _Only the Good Die Young_ got whacked because it was offensive to Catholics (oddly enough, it wasn’t the Catholics who complained, but the Baptists.)
I personally cut the line “We’ve been up and down this highway/Haven’t seen a god-damn thing” out of the Eagles’ _Life in the Fast Lane_ so as not to offend the Bible Belt sensibilities of our audience, who didn’t seem to object to the rest of the song being about cocaine. I also personally cut “who the fuck are you” out of _Who Are You_ for more clear-cut concerns.
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### Author:  [@cochrane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cochrane)
#### Post date: [October 17, 2019, 3:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/early-radio-edits/841875/13 "2019-10-17T03:59:57Z")
> [@notfrommensa](#):
>
> There is a sanitized version of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”
>
> “Cause I told you once, you son of a [del]bitch[/del] gun,
> I’m the best that’s ever been!”
There’s also _Uneasy Rider_, which had
“Well I had them all out there steppin’ an’ a fetchin’
Like their heads were on fire and their asses was catching”
edited so that the word “asses” was beeped out.
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### Author:  [@RioRico](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RioRico)
#### Post date: [October 17, 2019, 6:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/early-radio-edits/841875/14 "2019-10-17T06:10:24Z")
When, in a little tent show, I yelled for Hoyt Axton to sing GREENBACK DOLLAR, he left in the “damn”, whereas the Kingston Trio recording overlaid it with a guitar strum.
“Well, I don’t give a [strum] about a greenback dollar…”
Not quite edits, but careful wording, can be heard in Johnny Horton’s version of Jimmy Driftwood’s BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS, replacing “we really gave-em Hell” with “we really gave-em… well, now…” and in Homer & Jethro’s parody BATTLE OF CAMP CUCAMONGA, hinting at “nude” with “they were swimming in the… well, now…”
And in the first known euphemism for “motherfucker” in a top pop song, the Hollywood Argyles’ ALLEY OOP rendered “Well he’s a mean motorskooter…”
A little later, the MC5 live album KICK OUT THE JAMS had a clean DJ version issued where “brothers and sisters” replaced “motherfuckers”.
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### Author:  [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)
#### Post date: [October 17, 2019, 6:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/early-radio-edits/841875/15 "2019-10-17T06:53:17Z")
> [@Musicat](#):
>
> That sounds like an urban legend, a post-rationalization story. Do you have any good evidence for your claim?
[Per Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutti_Frutti_(song));
> [@](#):
>
> The song that he sang was a piece of music that he “had polished in clubs across the South.” Little Richard sang:
>
> A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom!
> Tutti Frutti, good booty
>
> After this lively performance, Blackwell knew the song was going to be a hit, but recognized that the lyrics, with their “minstrel modes and sexual humor”, needed to be revised for lyrical purity.
>
> Blackwell contacted local songwriter Dorothy LaBostrie to revise the lyrics, with Little Richard still playing in his characteristic style. According to Blackwell, LaBostrie “didn’t understand melody” but she was definitely a “prolific writer”.
>
> The original lyrics, in which “Tutti Frutti” referred to a homosexual man, were:
>
> Tutti Frutti, good booty
> If it don’t fit, don’t force it
> You can grease it, make it easy
>
> These were replaced with:
>
> Tutti Frutti, aw rooty
> Tutti Frutti, aw rooty.
>
> “Aw rooty” was a slang expression meaning “All right”. According to Charles Connor, Little Richard’s drummer, the original lyrics were:
>
> Tutti Frutti, good booty
> If it’s tight, it’s all right
> And if it’s greasy, it makes it easy
---
### Author:  [@Doug\_K](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doug_K)
#### Post date: [October 18, 2019, 1:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/early-radio-edits/841875/16 "2019-10-18T01:27:39Z")
> [@Smapti](#):
>
> [Per Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutti_Frutti_(song));
You didn’t quote enough.
> [@](#):
>
> As possible evidence that the “sexual song” theory was created later, songwriter LaBostrie was quoted as saying, “Little Richard didn’t write none of ‘Tutti Frutti’. I’ll tell you exactly how I came to write that. I used to live on Galvez Street and my girlfriend and I liked to go down to the drug store and buy ice cream. One day we went in and saw this new flavor, Tutti Frutti. Right away I thought, ‘Boy, that’s a great idea for a song’. So I kept it in the back of my mind until I got to the studio that day. I also wrote the flip side of ‘Tutti Frutti’, ‘I’m Just A Lonely Guy’, and a spiritual, ‘Blessed Mother’, all in the same day.” LaBostrie was still receiving royalty checks on the average of $5,000 every three to six months from the song in the 1980s.
There’s also the fact that the “original” lines don’t even come close to scanning.