As do I; the line works for me also. In my mind’s ear I imagine it being “if you know what I mean” but online lyrics say differently. Either way, I think it’s pretty obvious that it’s not just thrown in there to rhyme (unless it’s being sung by Dustin Hoffman).
This does however remind me of another clunky line. Avril Levine’s Sk8terboi:
“He was a boy, she was a girl
Can I make it anymore obvious?”
Whaaaa? Make what more obvious? It might work if it wasn’t the first line in the song and there was an “it” established. All the same, in context I understand it, just like the aforementioned Beatles line.
Sure, “on” the neck of Mr. Spock works fine. But as DWMarch wrote, it’s “from” the neck of Mr. Spock (regardless of what lyrics found on the Internet claim).
Back in the pre-internet, before we understood urban legends, when all we has was crappy radios without good sound, the story was that the lyric really was “who got sucked off”. Subversive! Snuck it right past the censors.
I always picture the last use of the line with Clapton staggering in, barely able to stand, and with slurred, alcohol scented breath. Like when drunks say “you’re my beeesssssttt frieeeend.”
The song was partly written for the film, but the lyrics were also partly inspired by the death from cancer of a young NZ filmmaker who was a friend of Peter Jackson’s.
I think it makes the song because he is not talking about a hypothetical person who he has a perfect relationship with but his current wife who is great to him even though he is a drunk. It makes it real and self effacing.
Tommy is a not actual deaf, dumb, and blind. He is an abuse survivor who has hysterical blindness, deafness, and muteness because of his trauma. All of his senses work but he is cut off from them except when he plays pinball.
Not according to most lyric sites and the way I hear it. And Mr. McCartney was more likely to add “r” sounds than take them out when singing (“…but I never sawr them at all…”).
I just meant that’s what I thought; it’s true, most lyric sites do say it’s “…we live in”. Also, when the “r” comes at the end of the words, our Limey friends tend to not pronounce them
I don’t think it sounds like that at all, and it just doesn’t seem like that good of a line that you’d want to work hard to incorporate it.
But I don’t think it has to stand for any words at all, because it does do a not-all-that-bad job of sounding like a bed that’s … ummm, oscillating at a relatively fast rate.
Whether that’s how it was originally intended or not is none of my business.
It starts off - Awoke today, felt your side of the bed;
The covers were still warm where you been layin’.
You were gone, oh gone, my heart was filled with dread;
You might not be sleeping here again.
Later you get the second verse - Did you ever waken to the sound of street cats making love?
You guess from the cries you were listening to a fight.
Well you know, oh know, hates the last thing they’re thinking of.
You know they’re only tryin’ to make it thru the night.
