I always assumed he was just over enunciating red and white. Saying them with a but of a “tss” at the end like a lounge singer.
davidm:
I’ve always assumed that he was using wordplay and referring to wine at the beginning and pills at the end. It would make no sense to pluralise wine that way. You would say “bottles of red”, not "bottle of reds’.drad dog ’s link, the “s” sounds are obvious and unambiguous at the end. At the beginning, “red” is obviously not pluralised. Admittedly, “white” is ambiguous. It may or may not end with an “s”, but if it does have an “s” sound that would kill the wordplay or at least make it less sensible, so I’ve always assumed that it doesn’t.
Joel is simply being pedantically correct. Wine made from “white” grapes is always referred to in the plural (“Vin de blancs”), but not that made from red grapes. Ask the French why. I dunno.
Knowing that Tom Clancy started as an “insurance salesman novelist” made this make perfect sense to me.
Kimstu:
No, I don’t think so; in the narrator’s conversation with his old classmate, he’s clearly referring to both Brenda and Eddie in the third person and commenting on them as someone who knew them back when. “There we were, waving Brenda and Eddie goodbye.” narrator married his high school sweetheart. All we know is that at some point he got married to somebody (probably before he “lost touch” with the friend he’s now talking to), and then divorced and remarried.
Remember, all of this is presumably supposed to be taking place many years after the 1975 events recalled in the song: long enough for the narrator to be surprised that his old friend “could ever look so good after so much time” . Probably the class of 1975 is supposed to be at least well into their thirties in the “present day” of the song’s setting: plenty of time to fit in a first marriage, divorce and remarriage.
But the song was written in, what, 1977? So the “present day” of the song was only a couple of years after Brender and Eddie peaked in '75.
Patx2
November 18, 2016, 10:09pm
64
Maybe they were saving the money for the waterbed while going steady, you know maybe back in '74 then they got married in '75 but the marriage didn’t last very long.
And here we are wavin’ Brenda and Eddie goodbye.
Hey_Hey_Paula:
[Bolding mine]
Please tell me I’m being whooshed here - Eleanor Rigby came out in 1966, She’s Leaving Home in 1968, and Another Day wasn’t even a Beatles song, it was a McCartney solo in 1970.
And here I was thinking “Another Day” was the Rutles song.
msmith537:
You may be right.
Friend, we’re all crazy here. No ‘may be’ about it.
