Nothing Ever Comes to No Good Up On Choctaw Ridge (Mysteries in pop music)

Heh - had never thought of it like that, but looking at the lyrics I think you might be right!

One explanation I’ve heard is that it’s a pun on “knowing she would”. Lennon didn’t actually have sex with the woman he was singing about but he liked that she was willing if he had asked.

In Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head (The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties) the author gives a note to the section on Norwegian Wood, like so:

‘Aside from a reference to the Sixties fashion for Scandinavian pine interiors, Lennon admitted to having no idea why Norwegian Wood was so called.’

MacDonald doesn’t cite a source for Lennon’s comment.

The song’s working title was This Bird Has Flown.

This may not fit the OP’s requst but I’ve always wondered. There’s a song called “24 Hours from Tulsa” in which the guy seems to be a long-haul trucker, on his way home, but he meets somebody irresistible when he’s “only…24 hours from Tulsa/only…one day away from your love.” And then he can never (never, never) go home again.

Okay. Now I was a California kid where you measure distance by time in a vehicle. Given that he was heading to Tulsa, where the hell was he? Given that Tulsa is pretty much spang in the middle of the country, how can you be “only” 24 hours from Tulsa? It’s really a stretch to get 24 hours away from Tulsa in any direction and still stay in the country. In 24 hours you could get almost to the last exit to Brooklyn (well, if you didn’t sleep until Brooklyn).

Or at least that was my thinking back then. Now I think I may have missed some crucial element of the song and he was traveling by wagon train. Since I haven’t heard it in decades I guess I’ll just have to wonder about that.

Thanks for that explanation. For some reason it never occured to me that she was the one to pull away. But those lyrics to fit when you think of it like that. I feel much better now… :slight_smile:

My take on this would be that he was on a circuit that was scheduled to take a couple of weeks to complete. Many truck drivers get routes that mean they will be on the road for three weeks at a time. Driving to the first city, dropping something off there, waiting around there for a day for the new load, then driving somewhere else, dropping off, waiting around, then delivering to somewhere else, and on and on.

He may have never been more than 300 miles from Tulsa, but the road trip would take three weeks to complete. So after being gone for 20 days, he was just 24 hours from being home again, but not neccessarily that many miles away.

I always thought he was going to war.

I’d always thought (admittedly with nothing to support it) that the deputy had told the singer the he was the sheriff.

When I’d first heard this, it sounded like the deputy and the singer had a past (referenced in the song) and it wasn’t a big stretch to my then-young imagination that the deputy would have told the singer that he was the sheriff (“I’m the law around here”), maybe to head off any complaints (you can complain about a deputy to the sheriff, but to whom would you complain about the sheriff ?). So when the singer had had enough and killed him, he thought he was killing the sheriff and was confused about being arrested for killing a deputy.

I don’t think it was ever made clear what was exactly going on in Sally Go Round the Roses.

Out of curiousity I googled it. Consensus seems to be it was about someone either dying young of something like cancer, or possibly someone who was planning on committing suicide. The orginal writer of the song did die of lung cancer in 1978, but the song was originally written in 1961, so I wouldn’t think it likely he was writing about his own illness.

Actually, I don’t recall what was revealed the day the music died. Please explain.