For over twenty years, I thought the last line of “Werewolves of London” was, “His hair was purple.”
Ten–fifteen years ago, Coverdale and Page had a short, curious project which resulted in a not too good album (forgot the title); anyhow, the only decent song in it was “Shake my tree”. But there was a recurring line in that song which sort of disturbed me, couse it really didn’t fit:
"Take me to the river, pour the whole shit over me."
Even when I found out he’s actually singing: *“Take me to the river, pour the ocean over me”, * I still could never again listen the song without hearing the “whole shit” part. In other words, I stopped listening to the album all together after a short while.
Ditto.
Free’s “All Right Now” is such a sing as loud as you can song. Especially that line that really should not be parking rent at all. That is so disappointing.
An oldie but a goodie when the Beatles sing Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds: The girl with colitis goes by.
It took me about 20 years to figure out the real lyrics.
Rock the Casbah by the Clash…
The second to the last line is “Fundamentally he can’t take it”, but in my mind it’s always been and shall remain “from the mental retardated”. Don’t bother me with details such as “there aint no such word”. What are you, retardated?
A Mexican friend of mine misheard the line “I shouted out, 'Who killed the Kennedys?”, from the Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil , as "I shouted out, “Who killed the Canadians?”. That made me laugh because the Canadians are so nice and peaceful, why would anyone want to kill them ?
“I’ll never be your Big Stuffed Birdie” (Beast of Burden)
Huh, that’s what I heard too, and never questioned it…
When I was twelve, my friend and I always sang “I’ll never be your beasty burger.”
Nah, it didn’t make sense, but back then beast of burden wouldn’t have made sense to us either.
Now, if you want to go really far back, how about the Witch’s soldiers marching tune in the Wizard of Oz. To me, it was always, “OLE0 MAAARGARINE.”
Paul Young might have been a butcher before he got into music. Why else would he sing “Every time you go away, You take a piece of meat with you…”
In that Sophie B. Hawkins ballad that was popular in 1996, the one that goes “As I lay me down to sleep…”, the background singers sound like they’re singing “I want tacos!”
I was really, really tired one day after work. I was driving home, half-listening to an oldies station and I swear to god I heard this:
“… clowns in my codpiece, clowns in my codpiece …
You’re so vain …”
I’ll never drive when that tired ever again.
Oh,oh, oh… now I remember.
Elton John
“Don’t let your son go down on me”
Seemed somehow strangely appropriate to me at the time.
“Exit light, enter night.”
From the same song…
Lyric: And they aren’t of Snow White…
Heard: And the album’s not white…
Well, it is from the Black Album.
For siome reason I’ve been hearing The Carpenters’ “It’s a Dirty Old Shame When All you get from Love is a Love Song” lately, and the lyrics bug me (besides for the usual reasons). The last line of the chorus, by the logic of rhyme and of reason ought to be:
“…But the Best Love songs are Written with a Broken Heart.”
But Karen doesn’t aspirate that “H” , and she trails off before she gets a chance to fully enunciate that “T”, so…
“My associate and I t’ink you are a great song writer and all, but you have fallen behind in your payments to our employer, Mr/ Big. We want to give you some incentive to encourage you to pay him on time in the future. Now this may inconvenience youse, but it will really be better for you in da long haul, because…”
“…the Best Love Songs are Written with a Broken Arm.”
“She’s a black magic woman and she’ s gonna take a pebble outa me.”
When my girlfriend was a kid sitting in church, she would get sad about the hymn Gladly, the Cross-eyed Bear.
Perhaps you’re thinking of the Michael Jackson cover, “Please Let Your Son Go Down on Me.”
speaking of MJ
one of his dancier numbers (post Thriller IIRC) had lyrics something like
“Keep Up (unintelligeable) and you can’t get enough”
In college my friends and I would always sing
“Shut Up, cause you’re f&$*ed up, and you can’t get it up”
Not misinterpreted per se, in that I never thought these were the words, but **Eminent Front ** (by The Who? Pete Townshend solo?)make me sing along “do it in the butt”. Holy cats, there is something wrong with me.
A song my parents often listened to by Bill Staines(or Charlie Maguire) had ( I thought) the following lyrics:
[quote]
Gypsy Would he, Gypsy Would he,
Gypsy would a music man [/quote}
I thought that this was a story about a girl named Gypsy who probably worked in a bar and was in love with a music man who traveled all over the place singing his song.
Two years ago I actually looked at the lyrics. It’s “Gypsy Woodie” as in Woodie Guthrie (Woody Guthrie?) and is more or less a biography of his life and how he traveled around singing songs and thus being a gypsy. No love story, no girl named Gypsy. I was terribly disapointed, even if the real lyrics make more sense.