While the government may not have censored radio, the networks themselves did. There were songs that got banned either because of drug references, like the Blues Magoos’ “Pipe Dream”, or sexual content, like the Standell’s “Try It”.
I haven’t read the whole thread, even though I’ve posted in it before, but has anyone else addressed the “He keeps his fire engine clean” line in “Penny Lane”? I have a feeling that it is NOT a reference to an emergency vehicle.
I’ve heard that song an many, many times, and I can honestly say that I never thought a “finger pie” was anything other than a pie you ate with your fingers. Along the lines of finger food. Maybe the censors, at least in the US, didn’t know what it meant elsewhere.
Or, IOW: nm!
Another voice from someone that doesn’t agree with the accepted meaning.
If the line is really about finger fucking, how does that fit into the song? Unless you’re going to say the whole song is a sexual metaphor? Is “Penny Lane” a person, and everyone is “in” her? Come on!
At the surface level, it’s a song about a simple life in a small town street. Every line is describing the people that live there.
So the song is supposed to be:
Here are some quaint people that live on Penny Lane
Oh by the way I’m finger fucking someone never mentioned in this song
And here are some more quaint people
What kind of song is that?
Heh! I was actually thinking about that song earlier today in regards to this thread, but forgot to mention it. Indeed.
Speaking of innuendoes…
There’s all that line in “Pass The Dutchie” that goes “How do you feel when you’ve got no food?” I knew it was a remake of a, ahem, silly drug song (see footnote) but I always interpreted the updated version as being about a Dutch oven (the cookware, not, well, that).
Footnote: Someone did a parody of Wings’ “Silly Love Songs” called “Silly Drug Songs”, but I can’t find a recording of it.
^^^^^ This
And Dylan walked because the suits (not Sullivan) wouldn’t let him sing John Birch Society Paranoid Blues. I have one live version of it where he begins “there ain’t nothing wrong with this song.”
Well, individual stations. My wife’s college roommate’s father owned a radio station in Virginia, and they were absolutely paranoid about dirty words getting on. Including a Tony Orlando song where “we can make it together” was misheard as “wake up naked together” and thus banned.
One Firesign Theatre album had a warning on the back about maybe not playing it on the radio because of the F-CC.
The ‘prick’ reference was in the same routine, about how context can make a word dirty. For example, you can prick your finger, but you can’t finger your prick.
I think what you’re both overlooking is that, at the time of “Penny Lane”'s release, the lyrics of Lennon and McCartney were not particularly known for making up nonsense phrases. With the exception of “Strawberry Fields Forever”, which was the flip side of “Penny Lane”, the group’s most celebrated nonsense songs (including the two you mentioned) were later releases. If the censors chose to handwave away “finger pie” as a harmless nonce term, it wasn’t because the boys had made a big name for themselves as purveyors of meaningless lyrics.
Other stories of small-town radio censorship.
The owner of one station I worked at pulled Paul Anka’s Having My Baby because “we don’t play those kinds of songs.” Oddly enough, he let us play Gordon Lightfoot’s Sundown.
At another stop on my small-town dj career, the owner pulled Johnny Paycheck’s Take This Job and Shove It because it offended his wife.