Am I the only one so afflicted? Who else out there hears the wrong song lyrics, then years later, hears the correct ones and goes: :smack:
My example:
When I was a young child I had an album (yes, LP…vinyl…that black disk with funny grooves) of the Archies. One of the songs was “S.K.O.O.B.Y. D.O.O.”
The lyrics I heard were:
“Picnic in the grass, diggin’ Mamma’s ass with Skooby Doo” :eek:
I can remember, being a young child, that I couldn’t believe they were allowing lyrics like that in a song! It probably didn’t help that the lyrics were being played on an old monaural portable record player. Of course, I was also too young to know who Mamma Cass (Elliott) was…which, naturally, is what the lyrics really were…(“Picnic in the grass, diggin’ Mamma Cass with Skooby Doo”)
So, any other takers out there in Dopedom? What other examples can someone cite out there?
Interestingly enough, last night I received my SDMB White Elephant (yay!) and in it was the sequel book to “'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy”. It’s a book filled with these things.
I was chuckling at some of the mishearings, not many of which I can remember right now. I’ll have to bring the book in tomorrow and post some of the weirder ones.
The one I do remember (because I’d thought the same thing) was “…silence like a casserole…” from The Sound of Silence. The proper lyric is, of course, “…science like a cancer grows…”
In the middle of the Pogues’ ballad, “The Broad, Majestic Shannon,” Shane MacGowan describes going down to the sea with his girl to “watch the robots landing.” I was kinda disappointed when I found out he was actually saying “rowboats.”
Not sure if this is related to the book scout1222 mentions, but the website http://www.kissthisguy.com also has some good ones.
My wife thought the Prodigy song “Smack My Bitch Up” was actually called “Snap my Picture”. So now every time it comes on we mime a camera taking a picture.
It was a good five years before I realized that the lyric in Groovin’ by the Rascals wasn’t “life could be ecstasy/you and me and Leslie.” I always wondered, who the hell is Leslie? Her kid??
Of course, the lyric is “you and me endlessly.” :smack:
My mom had a hilarious mistranslation of that song… I wish I could remember all of it, but it started with “Just like a wide window…”
The next line in the song is actually something like “Sings a song, sounds like she’s singin’ oooh, oooh, oooh…” but mom’s chorus just kept talking about that window… I’ll have to give her a call.
The most memorable one was when I was riding with a friend playing a game where we’d try to be the first to identify the next song playing on the radio. A Billy Joel song came on, we both got that it was Billy Joel, but neither could remember the title. Finally, my friend said, “Oh I know! It’s She’s a Wazy Woman!”
After I explained the correct title and she’d pulled over the car so she could stop laughing, I asked just what a “wazy” woman was, anyway. “I don’t know; I just thought it was one of those song things.”
Oops, I meant Led Zeppelin’s Going to California, not Battle of Evermore. Pshaw! And I call myself a Led Zeppelin fan. It’s back to the self-flagellation, for me.
A mis-heard lyric that embarassed the hell out of me was the chorus to Collective Soul’s ‘She Said’. I thought it went like this:
“You like shrimp or chow rice? She said”
Well the real lyric is:
“Life’s river shall rise, she said”
So one day driving in the car with my wife and I start singing this song out loud. My wife looks at me and says, “What the hell are you singing?” “You like shrimp or chow rice? She said” I said. My wife bursts out laughing and corrects me on the lyric. She told all her friends and family about it. God it was awful.
I only recently discovered that The Strokes, in their song New York City Cops are not singing “New York City cops/ and Agent Smart.”
(It’s actually “New York City cops/ They ain’t too smart”)
This bemused the hell out of me.
“What does Maxwell Smart have to do with New York City cops?” I thought. “And why would it be so offensive that they’d have to take the song off the album in America post-9/11?”
Also, there is a Go-Go’s song which is famously misheard. They claim that it’s called Our Lips Are Sealed, but everyone knows that it is really called Alice the Seal. Anyway, at work one day this song came on, and I mis-heard this mis-hearing as “Alisdair Seal”.
And finally, although I know the correct lyric, whenever I hear Pearl Jam’s I Got ID, I am convinced Eddier Vedder sings “I’ve got mammaries/ I’ve got shit,” rather than the less bosomy “I’ve got memories…”
