Not my favourite song, but one I like, is The Wreck Of The Old Ninety-Seven there’s a math error. ‘The first 46 are reserved for the majors, the captains have the next 49. There’s only one other ship at the end of the apron. Said the shavetail, “Then that one is mine.”’ That’s only 96. Why couldn’t Oscar Brand sing ‘The first 47 are reserved for the majors’?
In I Wanted Wings Brand sings, ‘I’d rather be a terrier, than a flyer on a carrier, with my hand around a bottle. You can keep your god-damned throttle, buster.’ This lyric doesn’t make sense, and I think he should have used the original lyrics ‘I’d rather be a bellhop, than a flyer on a flat-top, with my hand around a bottle…’ I (personally) have never seen a terrier with its hand around a bottle. Indeed, I’ve never seen a terrier with hands. But it’s perfectly natural for a bellhop to be carrying a bottle, and ‘flat-top’ was a common term for an aircraft carrier.
I call that the “Hot dog bun, my sister’s a nun” effect.
From John Prine’s Illegal Smile:
And you may see me tonight with an illegal smile…
It don’t cost very much, but it lasts a long while.
Won’t you please tell the man I didn’t kill anyone?
No I’m just tryin’ to have me some fun…
Well done,
Hot dog bun,
My sister’s a nun…
It’s a song about a hobo and a free spirit. He’s saying that the reason he loves her is because she understands him and his need to keep moving and stay free. The columns and Ivy could be a reference to tradition, or perhaps an Ivy-league background the character is walking away from. These are the kinds of shackles (tradition, expectations of college grads, relationships, etc) that keep people tied up and unfree in the narrator’s story.
In the song he’s assuring her that even though she let him go, he will continue to love her. Or more to the point, he continues to love her because she let him go.
The character may be a dipshit, but the lyrics are pretty awesome. They capture the hobo spirit pretty well.
That’s why I wrote “second level”. The line was intended to work on two levels, and it was imperfectly phrased for the one level in order to fit better the second.
I love Dylan’s “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again,” probably because the whole thing is inspired nonsense:
Oh, the ragman draws circles
Up and down the block
I’d ask him what the matter was
But I know that he don’t talk
And the ladies treat me kindly
And they furnish me with tape
But deep inside my heart
I know I can’t escape
Of course, growing up listening to songs on AM radio in the 1960s as I did, you were lucky to understand more than half the lyrics anyway, so if the parts you could understand more or less hung together, and you liked the music, that was about as good as it got.
