I believe it’s supposed to be one of those overly cutesy nicknames the couple used that he detested and found clingy. Always made sense to me, but then I was obsessive about reading the lyrics, and Elton’s albums were wonderful in providing them. Wish all musicians did that.
That’s what I always figured but this site claims that Sugar Bear is a reference to the guy that saved his life that night.
“I am the sun, and the air.”
Took me a long time to figure that one out.
(son and heir)
Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women”. How kind of the narrator’s sweetheart to care for him while he has a nasty head cold!
(“She blew my nose and then she blew my mind…”)
When I was 10, The Eagles’ “Hotel California” gave me the creeps. I interpreted it literally, thinking it was about some scary haunted hotel with robot butlers (“we are programmed to receive”) and animal sacrifice dinners (“they stab it with their steely knives but they just can’t kill the beast”) that killed you and trapped your soul forever (“you can check out any time at all but you can never leave”).
It didn’t help matters that the first time I heard the song was while trapped in a nighttime traffic jam on a dark stretch of Pacific Coast Highway beyond Malibu. We were on our way to a Boy Scout campout in the Santa Monica Mountains when we hit Friday evening Malibu traffic. Dark hills on our right, dark empty void on our left where the ocean should have been, and nothing but red tailights ahead as far as we could see.
And so did I until, um, five seconds ago.
Actually, there is a definite pause there:
“She blew my nose and then she blew my . . . mind.”
And in concerts, they have been known to sing slightly different words there.
“Afternoon Delight”. Which I’m sure I’m not unique in, considering that the idea that someone had NO IDEA it was about lunchtime sex pops up a lot of places, most notably in an episode of Arrested Development. I loved the song when I was a little kid (I was bout 6 or 7 when it came out). I’m sure my parents just gritted their teeth and thanked God I was too young to get it…
In another thread I mentioned how for a long time I thought it was about a couple in a park watching a fireworks display. I never questioned why fireworks were being shot in the afternoon instead of the evening though.
I was a little kid when it came out also. Since I spoke no English at the time, and the radio DJ translated only the song title, I thought it was about having some ice cream or some other snack after school.
This is still how I picture it. I can grasp it’s all a metaphor, and yet, I’m pretty sure he’s singing about a weird fucking hotel somewhere in the desert.
I was old enough to know what it meant, so I had to grit my own teeth when ever I heard it.
I thought that couldn’t possibly be the right lyrics. So I substituted “hose”, thinking it was a euphemism for a BJ.
I too thought it was about eating candy during the day. In another thread where I mentioned this, I also mentioned that I thought that Michael Jackson wanted to wake up early and run to his girlfriend’s house in the song Got To Be There.
Oops, missed that 