This gets hashed out every time we do this thread, but there is indeed an East Side of Chicago, hard against the Indiana border. It’s neither as well known, nor as large, as the other three directional sides, but it’s there. When phone books existed, the Chicago phone book had whole columns full of businesses with “East Side” in their name.
Now Al Capone, it’s true, never called his gang to war with the forces of the law, because he was the law. His calls to war were restricted to rival gangs. But remember, the part about “a hundred cops are dead” was just some guy on the street running his mouth; even within the song, it didn’t necessarily happen.
If she was rising by the time he got to Phoenix, then it would be eight more hours by the time he made Albuquerque, way too late for her to stop at lunch and give him a call.
The first line of the Sublime song “April 29, 1992 (Miami)” is “April 26, 1992…”
The singer just plain got the date wrong. They were signing about the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles on April 29, 1992. I guess the recording take was so good they just kept it.
Funny thing is that April 26, 1992 is my cousin’s birthday. I remember sitting around watching the news while we waited for news about my cousin. I guess we weren’t watching riots on TV like I had thought. Or he was in the hospital for 3 days.
No, he didn’t. He spent a month after his defeat at Waterloo travelling around trying to rally support for yet another attempt to recapture his former glory before finally conceding defeat.
And the 4000 holes line was inspired by a newspaper story about the police drilling thousands of holes in the ground looking for the body of a murder victim. So I think so, blindboyard. (Ain’t tryin’ to start nothin’, though.)
Billy Joel has said in interviews that he intentionally wrote the song with complete disregard for history. Even his own, as neither Billy Joel himself nor any “legend in his time” ever came out of Oyster Bay, Long Island with a six-pack in his hand. And geography, too: the Rio Grande is not a divide between “east and west”, it is the border between the US and Mexico.
I didn’t realize it for years, but the Ballad of Casey Jones, as often sung, has lines at the end that weren’t only inaccurate, they were offensive. Jones was a real-life engineer who did give up his life for his crew and passengers on another train, and the Ballad was originally written by someone who knew and idolized him. But:
The first I learned about these verses was when I heard Allen Sherman’s parody, J.C. Cohen, about a subway conductor, and whose widow tells her children they’re going to Disneyland because “you’ve got another poppa on the Monorail,”
