There’s a “bonus track” of sorts on the early-90s Innocence is Bliss demo by Swedish death metal band Leukemia. It doesn’t appear in the track listing on the cover, but I’ve seen a site or two list it as Booze and Don’t Loose (misspelling theirs, not mine). I’ve always been curious about its origins.
Here’s the track:
It sounds like it’s probably a traditional song of some sort that the band covered. Any idea what the original is? What it’s called in its native tongue?
The lyrics are very deep and serious, as you would expect from a death metal band:
As you suspect, the lyrics are in Swedish. First verse:
Translated this means
They then continue for several verses, counting down the number of humps on the poor camel’s back. The final verse where Kalle has no humps ends with “För Kalle Kamel är en hest”, meaning “For Kalle the Camel is a horse”.
The song is a children’s song, usually sung loudly and badly from the back seat of a car on a long trip, the initial number of humps may vary. In other words, it is a variant of “100 bottles of beer on the wall”.
Excellent! Thanks so much. Now I can die in peace.
Funny, that reminds me of the thing my wife’s family used to do when she was a kid. When they were on long car trips, the parents devised a system to let the kids know how much longer they had to go.
They started out each trip with a dog. (An imaginary dog, for the record.) The dog would lose legs as they got to their destination. Like a “leg” of the trip.
kids: How much longer?
dad: The dog still has two legs left.
When they got to the destination, the dog would have no legs.
The dog got the legs back on the trip back, so it was OK.