Eminence Front.
There’s a Zeppelin song, Living, Loving Maid, that for years I thought opened with:
With her purple operator and her fifty-scent hair
The Go-Go’s, Our Lips Are Sealed:
“Honest Lucille”
I always heard the line “Heartbreaker, with your 44, I want to tear your world apart” by the Stones as “Heartbreaker, with your vodaphone, I want to tear your world apart.” I guess they’re just pissed about bad cellphone ettiquette.
<insert sighing smiley> And I actually understood “Blinded by the Light” Manfred Mann and I must have used up all my lyrics Ju, 'cause that’s one of the few I have ever gotten right without looking it up.
The big one that springs ot mind whenever this subject is mentioned is “Stealing when I should have been** lying**” Uriah Heep
Is really “. . . should have been **buying ** .”
I still like my lyrics better – the whole choosing the ineffective & inappropriate sin thing over the whole be a better person thing.
so you actually heard
“revved up like a duece”
and not
“wrapped up like a douche”
the way most folks did?
the lyrics are actually slightly more intelligeable in Bruce Springsteen’s original (he wrote it, you know)
My mom heard Billy Idol’s “Eyes Without a Face” as “How’s About a Date?”
:rolleyes:
{slight hijack}
not a misunderstood lyric, but for any country music fans.
There is a classic Merle Haggard song that has been sung and resung in honky tonks everywhere. “Daddy Frank” It’s about a traveling family band.
Singing it one night at a jam session I finally realized something about these perenial lyrics. They go like this. 1st verse.
Daddy Frank played the guitar and the french harp
Sister played the ringing tamborine.
Momma couldn’t hear our pretty music,
but she read our lips and helped the family sing.
That little band was all a part of living
and our only means of living at the time
It wasn’t like a normal family combo
cause Daddy Frank the guitar man, was blind.
Plucks on the ole heart strings don’t it.
Suddenly after years of doing this classic I stopped the band abd said
"wait a minute, Wait just a minute.
Moma couldn’t hear our pretty music
but she read our lips and helped the family sing?
What do you suppose that sounded like?
{insert unintelligible off keying singing like noises}
From then on when we or anyone else would do that song someone would begin to make those noises and we would start to lose it.
Hehe. My ex-boyfriend/best friend type person used to think Walk of Life was “Walk Walk Run”.
Funny I just noticed this thread today - I was thinking of mistakes I used to make.
Patsy Cline - I Fall to Pieces was “I Bought a V6”. I first heard it when I was little on an ad that showed a car falling apart, so that’s what I thought she said.
One that really made me laugh when I heard it on the radio was “Slow Talkin’ Walter, the Fire Engine Guy” for “Smoke on the water, fire in the sky.”
And for the Beach Boys’ Kokomo: “Martinique, that Monserrat mystique” - When I was little, all I could hear in that song was “mounds of rotten steak”. Logically I knew it couldn’t be what they were saying, but this was before the Internet so I had no means of checking! A guy in the university of the ex/bestfriend I mentioned above had a sheet of misheard Kokomo lyrics on his door, which included “your mom’s a rotten sink” and “Vermont’s a rotten state”.
I have to add that a pet peeve of mine is people who submit things to those sites which are clearly not what they actually heard, in an attempt to be funny. Like “We built this city on rock and roll”… I read somewhere that someone thought they said “We killed this kitty with rocks and stones.” How the hell could you actually hear that and seriously believe that’s what they said, even for a second, unless you have potatoes growing in your ears? And another example: On the previously linked site, “I’m Just a Girl” → “I’m Just a Squirrel”. I have no problem with alternate lyrics… but making up alternate lyrics does not make them misheard lyrics.
Why thank you! I don’t want to kill you either! 
Oh, sorry for the double post, but I just realised what song you were talking about. I used to love that song… and now I have it in my head!
Though I had a misheard lyric of my own for that song. I thought he said “Pour your potion over me.” Ehh, it’s not as funny as yours, but it’s relevant in that I just found out now, while reading your post.
My mom hears the line “Don’t mess around with the guy in shades, oh, no…” from Sunglasses at Night as “Don’t mess around with my Diet Seven-Up.”
Just Googled to see what the real lyrics are.
From my unashamedly atheistic childhood:
While shepherds washed their socks by night
I saw three ships come sailing in
On Christmas Day in the Morning.
The Verge and Mary and Christ were there…
Yep. But then, “deuce coupe” has more relevance to my life than “massengill” so it may have been an automatic brain translation rather than literal hearing. Like I said, I think used my entire understanding words lifetime allotment on that one damn song.
I thought I had an Aunt Maple until I was about 16. :smack: Aunt Mabel was a very patient woman.
…and what’s with the part that sounds like
???
according to sing365.com, it’s
And little Early-Pearly came in by her curly-wurly and asked me if I needed a
ride,
of course, I’ve always heard it as
and my little early girly gave my hair a curly whirly and asked me if I needed a ride
I was 12 when “The Theme From Shaft” came out. I’d never heard the phrase “private dick” before, so for quite a long time, I thought Isaac Hayes was saying, “Who’s the black pile of dirt that’s a sex machine to all the chicks?”
I like your misunderstood one’s better. Far less disturbing.
Back then it was:
Me- “WTF did he just say?”
My poor kids had to put up with me doing this their whole lives. It always got a giggle out of them. As a matter of fact, until now I thought I (and Weird Al) were the only ones who did it. Unfortunately I can’t recall any of them at the mo’.
(sorry for this double-post ~ still getting used to no-edit)
Before the internet, most of us had no idea what the lyrics were unless they were on the liner notes. Led Zeppelin lyrics were impossible to decipher, so everyone made them up as we sang along, faking it to look like we knew the words that no one else did. Irrepressibly mischievous, I liked to catch people in the act doing that: we’re singing along to zep, all nonsense syllables mind you, and I ask innocently, “what was that he just said?”. Heh. Got 'em every time.
For years I thought that the lyrics to the carol Silent Night included *round your * virgin, mother and child.
As a kid, I always imagined it was instructions for some kind of Christmas square-dance. :smack:
“Games People Play” by the Alan Parsons Project: the last line of the chorus still sounds like “Gay people play in the middle of the night” :eek: